July
23, 2018:
President
Trump to
Islamic State
of Iran: Watch
out. IN
an early
morning tweet
in response to
Rouhani's
threat to shut
down the
STrait of
Hormuz,
President
Trump warned,
"Never, ever
threaten the
United States
again or you
will suffer
consequences
the likes of
which few
throughout
history have
ever suffered
before."

July
22, 2018: SecState
Pompeo wows
Iranian-American
audience. In
another
landmark
speech, this
time at the
Ronald Reagan
library in
California,
Pompeo shows
that he "gets
it" on Iran.
For the first,
time, we have
a leader at
the very top
of government
who
understands
there can be
no changing
the behavior
of the regime
without
changing the
regime itself.
Read the
full speech
here.
Apparently in
response to
Pompeo's
speech,
Iranian
unicorn Hassan
Rouhani threatens
to shut down
international
shipping in
the Strait of
Hormuz and
warned the
U.S., "Do not
play with the
lion's tale;
you will
regret it
forever."

May
21, 2018: SecState
Pompeo to Tehran: stop spreading terror,
or else. Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo's landmark speech on Monday to
the Heritage Foundation set out U.S.
policy for the post-JCPOA period. "No
more," he said. "No more wealth creation
for Iranian kleptocrats. No more
acceptance of missiles landing in Riyadh
and in the Golan Heights. No more
cost-free expansions of Iranian power. No
more."

Pompeo
listed no fewer than 12 U.S. demands of
the Tehran regime. They are worth listing
here, since these are the benchmark
demands for evaluating the new policy of
the Trump administration.

First, Iran must declare to the IAEA a full
account of the prior military dimensions of
its nuclear program, and permanently and
verifiably abandon such work in perpetuity.

Second, Iran must stop enrichment and never
pursue plutonium reprocessing. This includes
closing its heavy water reactor.

Third, Iran must also provide the IAEA with
unqualified access to all sites throughout the
entire country.

Iran must end its proliferation of ballistic
missiles and halt further launching or
development of nuclear-capable missile
systems.

Iran must release all U.S. citizens, as well
as citizens of our partners and allies, each
of them detained on spurious charges.

Iran must end support to Middle East
terrorist groups, including Lebanese
Hizballah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic
Jihad.

Iran must respect the sovereignty of the
Iraqi Government and permit the disarming,
demobilization, and reintegration of Shia
militias.

Iran must also end its military support for
the Houthi militia and work towards a peaceful
political settlement in Yemen.

Iran must withdraw all forces under Iranian
command throughout the entirety of Syria.

Iran, too, must end support for the Taliban
and other terrorists in Afghanistan and the
region, and cease harboring senior al-Qaida
leaders.

Iran, too, must end the IRG Qods Force’s
support for terrorists and militant partners
around the world.

And too, Iran must end its threatening
behavior against its neighbors – many of whom
are U.S. allies. This certainly includes its
threats to destroy Israel, and its firing of
missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates. It also includes threats to
international shipping and destructive – and
destructive cyberattacks.

The list "is pretty
long," Pompeo acknowledged, "but if you take a
look at it, these are 12 very basic
requirements. The length of the list is simply
a scope of the malign behavior of Iran. We
didn't create the list, they did."

May
20, 2018: New
videos of
violent regime
crack-down
against
peaceful
protestors in
Kazeroun. Our
friends at the
Islamic State
of Iran Crime
Research
Center have
done an
amazing job,
pulling
together
graphic
evidence of
the regime's
murderous
assault on
peaceful
protesters
over the past
three days.
Please look at
their report,
"This
is not Gaza,
this is Iran!"

May 17, 2018: Pro-Tehran lobbyist
resigns from his lobbying group.
Trita Parsi says farewell. But his sudden
departure raises questions. Just a coincidence,
or FBI bust? Go
here for the latest on Parsi and his
outrageous, anti-American activities; and view
FDI's special NIAC
Resources page.

May 15, 2018: Treasury
reimposes sanctions on Bank Markazi
(the central bank). And this, as Bank
Markazi is going bankrupt inside Iran for
years of insider lending at annual rates of
26%

May
14, 2018:
Former
Sec/State John
Kerry caught
in the act in
Paris. In
addition to
his very
public
meetings to
oppose the
official
policy of the
United States
of America in
Italy and
elsewhere
(arguably a
violation of
the Logan Act,
if anyone
actually
cares), Kerry
was caught
lunching just
across the
street from
the George V
hotel in Paris
with former
Iranian
foreign
minister Kamal
Kharazzi. Photos are here.

May
10, 2018:Israel
gives Iran a
lesson in
strategic
deterrence.
From FoxNews
opinion.

May
8,
2018:Attempted
assassination
of Iranian
dissident in
New York. If
confirmed,
it's the first
such attack in
the U.S. since
1981. From Frontpage
mag.
- President
Trump ends the
Iran deal and
reimposes U.S.
sanctions. Read
the details
from the White
House here
and here.

April 24, 2018: State Must
Demand Iran Free Hostages,
Congress says. A
bipartisan letter sent to Acting
Secretary of State John Sullivan today
requested detailed information on
efforts by the Trump Administration to
secure the release of six U.S.
hostages currently held by Iran. The
letter, spear-headed
by California Democrat Ted W. Lieu,
was signed by Republicans Mike McCaul
of Texas, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of
Florida, and 43 other members of
Congress. "The United States has a
moral responsibility to devote
resources to these hostages and make
their return a priority," the letter
states.

March 21, 2018: Bernie Sides
with Iran's Mullahs.
The Senate today debated a motion
introduced by Vermont Socialist Bernie
Sanders that would force the
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Yemen,
where they have been helping Saudi
Arabia in its proxy war with Iran. As
FDI CEO Kenneth Timmerman wrote in
today's Frontpage mag: "The surprising
support the resolution won from 44
U.S. Senators handed a big win to
Iran, which is engaged in a hot war
with Saudi Arabia on the Arabian
Peninsula. It was a huge slap in the
face to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad
bin Salman, who was meeting with
President Trump in the White House as
the Senate debated the motion on the
floor. It also showed the extreme
damage recent scandals involving NSA
snooping and political bias at the FBI
have done to the credibility of the
United States government." If
successful, Timmerman went on, the
Sanders-Lee resolution "would put the
dysfunction U.S. Senate in charge of
U.S. foreign and military policy."
Read the full story here.

March
19, 2018: President Trump on
Nowruz. In
a strongly worded and emotion
appeal on Nowruz, President Trump
recalled Darius the Great, who
"asked God to protect Iran from
three dangers: hostile armies,
drought, and falsehood. Today, the
Iranian regime's Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)
represents all three."

President Trump went on: "First,
the IRGC is not Iranian in name or
deed. It is a hostile army that
brutalizes and steals from the
Iranian people to fund terrorism
aboad... Second, the IRGC's
corruption and mismanagement have
exacerbated the effects of an
on-going drought and created an
ecological crisis. Unregulated dam
constructon under its companies
like Khatam al-Anbia has dried
rivers and lakes and helped create
unprecedented dust storms that
threat Iranians' jobs and lives.
Third, deceit has become official
state policy. The IRGC employs
propaganda and censorship to hide
the factg that the Iranian regime
plunders Iran's wealth and abuses
its people."

President Trump's message was
starkly different from those
issued by his predecessor, who
once pointedly claimed that Iran's
unelected clerical dictator
expressed the will of the Iranian
people. This year's historic
message also shows that the
President has swept his
administration from the last
vestiges of the Rex Tillerson
accomodationists, including State
Department Iran desk officer and
NIAC infiltrator Sahar
Nowrouzzadeh, who was fired at the
same time as Tillerson.

Nowrouzzadeh was caught
out for penning several
anti-Trump articles - apparently
vetted by Tillerson appointees! -
which she signed as a State
Department employee. We applaud
the president for firing both her
and Tillerson.

Feb.
19, 2018: Police clash with
dervishes in Tehran; at least 3
police dead. Dervishes
of the Gonabadi denomination
clashed with security forces
in front of a police station
in northern Tehran today to
demand the release of arrested
Sufis, Reuters and
BBC Persian are
reporting. Cellphone videos
show a bus driving in a
formation of police charging
protestors in full riot gear.
Regime officials have acknowledged
that three policemen died
in the clashes. YouTube video
of the clashes is available here
and here.

Feb 11, 2018: Reza Pahlavi says
regime supporters have
infiltrated US-government funded
Voice of America and Radio
Farda. In
a Skype interview with an
Iranian exile television
station in London, the oldest
son of the former Shah accused
pro-regime "moderates" and
"reformers" of slanting the
coverage of U.S. government
Persian-language media in
favor of the regime. Speaking
with former VOA host Bijan
Farhoodi, Pahlavi said that
VOA and Radio Farda needed
to be purged of such
persons, because the Iranian
people want to get rid of the
regime and not reform it."The main issue with these outlets is the
infiltration of reformists in their ranks
[who] try to perpetuate the reformist
discourse, which helps the regime stay in
power," Pahlavi said. "There needs to be a
complete purge of these reformist elements in
these outlets, because the Iranian people have
called the legitimacy of the entire theocratic
system into question and are no longer
interested in reforming it," he
added.

Pahlavi's
comments set off a twitterstorm in farsi and
in English, many of them using the hashtag
#ReformBBG.

Jan.
25, 2018: "#Where_Is_She?" The
woman who took off her headscarf and
waved it atop a stick like a white
flag on the first day of the Iran
protests on Dec. 27 has reportedly
been arrested a second time and has
since disappeared in Iran's Islamic
Gulag. Amnesty International, citing
three eyewitnesses, believes
she was taken to a detention center in
Tehran known as Kalantari 148 on
December 27. According to human rights
lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, the woman was
"initially released after her arrest
but was subsequently detained again,"
and is currently facing criminal
charges. According to Soutoudeh, the
woman is 31 years old and has a
19-month old infant. Social media
users: Tweet #Where_Is_She? to demand
her release.

Jan.
20, 2018: Timmerman on
#IranProtests#. Listen
to FDI President & CEO Kenneth R.
Timmerman with John Loeffler on
the Steele on Steele radio show
today. Timmerman calls the Iran
protests the biggest and most
significant since 1979.

Jan.
17, 2018: The Internet
imperative.

A
lead editorial in today's
Wall Street journal picks up
demands we have been hearing for the
past two weeks from Iranian activists
that the U.S. government can provide
real assistance to pro-freedom
activists by providing unjammable free
Internet service.

Jan. 11, 2018: FDI at the
European Parliament. FDI
President and CEO Kenneth R.
Timmerman with current and former
leaders of PJAK at the
European Parliament for a
conference on Iran's
minorities and#IranProtests.

Jan. 10, 2018: More than 420
arrested; protests hit half of
Iran. Iran
Human Rights activists today
published a report listing 420
persons arrested during the first
seven days of the protests. They also
published a breakdown of where the
protests occured.

Jan.
9, 2018 - Day 13 of
#IranProtests

-
Khamenei goes to Qom seeking support
from traditional clergy, but reportedly
finds no one to back a
government crackdown on protests.

Jan. 8, 2018 - Day 12 of
#IranProtests

-
Hundreds of videos of renewed protests
all across Iran circulate on Twitter,
despite regime claims that protests
are dying down.

Jan. 7, 2018: Day 11 of
#IranProtests- The People's
Fedaii Guerillas claim that Ahmadinejad
was detained by regime security
agents on the 2nd day of the protests,
and remains in some form of custody
today. Mojtaba Khamenei, son of
ayatollah Khamenei, is negotiating
with him to obtain the resignation of
Majlis speaker Ali Larijani.
- VOA's pro-regime bias attracts a
wider attention, with BBG Watch criticizing
VOA for posting a "victory
statement" by the Iranian regime "with
a Pravda-like top VOA headline."

Jan.
6, 2018: Day 10 of
#IranProtests.-
Protests spread to more than 79
cities across Iran. This
Radio
Farda video is from Mahshahr (h/t Farnaz
Fassihi).
- Iran's "Reformists" show
their true colors: they
are with the regime, not the
pro-freedom movement.

- In
lock step with regime propaganda, Voice of America
declared
the Iran protests "waning" three days ago,
and in a shameful display, now
headline paid crowds of government employees
"rallying" in support of the regime. when
pro-regime protests of government employees took
to the streets in Tehran. Reformists

Jan. 5, 2018: Day 9 of
#IranProtests.
- Owner of AhmadNews webchannel,
Roohollah Zam, tells
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
he is not linked to any political
group in Iran, but seeks to "serve
the Iranian people's interests"
against the regime.

- At
the United Nations Security
Council, Russia and France joined
the Iranian regime representative
in blasting the U.S. for
interfering in Iran's domestic
affairs. Meanwhile, U.S. officials
including Nikki Haley and SecState
Rex Tillerson broaden
the Trump administration support
for the rights of the protestors.

Jan.
3, 2018: Day 7 of #IranProtests.
- Long-time friend of FDI, Iman
Foroutan,reveals
for the first time how the Iran
protests are being coordinated. This
ground-breaking story should be
circulated widely. A former senior
regime official, codenamed "Behrouz,"
explains to the New Iran the
underground command structure of the
movement. Most importantly, he notes
that movement leaders have understood
that they must use nonviolence and
civil disobedience, since the regime
has a monopoly on violence. This
is key for preventing Iran from
descending into a Syria-style civil
war. FDI is proud to be an early
support and member of The
New Iran.-
FDI Executive Director Kenneth
Timmerman in Frontpagemag.com:
"The US doesn't have to lose the
information war on Iran." The Voice of
America has been worse than inadequate
in its coverage of the Iran protest
movement. President Trump urgently
needs to fire VOA leadership and
replace them with his own team
- Watch
the amazing press conference of
U.S. ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley
(hint: you won't find the link on
VOA...)

Jan.
2, 2018: Day 6 of #IranProtests.

-
The Internet messaging service
Telegram has shut down a key channel,
AmadNews, used by protestors.
#ShameOnYou, Pavel Durov. Read the
full report from
Politico.- Voice of Americashamelessly
parrots Iranian regime propaganda,
while relegating President Trump's
tweet in support of #IranProtests to graph
16 of a lead story. VOA coverage
just keeps getting worse
and worse, despite some catchup
on social media. #ShameOnYou,
@VOANews. - FDI President & CEO
Kenneth R. Timmerman has sent a
memo to the White House and to
key leaders in Congress on why VOA
coverage needs to change, and how to
accomplish this. READ
THE MEMO (pdf document).

- We are told that a group of former
and current VOA broadcasters met with
a top NSC official at the White
House last week to protest the
firing of Mandarin service
journalists. At the last minute, two
members of the Broadcasting Board of
Governors board arrived. One of them
read from a draft BBG strategy
document that "VOA news must always be
unbiased." (This is not, by the way,
what the VOA Charter says).
Thankfully, the NSC staffer shut down
the BBG board member saying that VOA
news should be biased -
in favor of democracy.

Dec.
31, 2017: Day 4 of
#IranProtests.

Protests
spread throughout Iranian Kurdistan,
Ahwaz, Balouchestan, and elsewhere.
This is not 2009. Also: President
Trump weighs in again over the
weekend over twitter, while former
Obama officials call for U.S. to
keep quiet in the face of regime
killing. Disgraceful! (graphic below
courtesy of HRNA,
h/t Salman
al-Ansari. Video updates
available here:

Dec. 30, 2017: The Regime
strikes back.

Regime
security officials met on Saturday
morning, the third day of nation-wide
protests, and issued orders to
suppress the uprising, according to
Mansour Osanloo, the former head of
the Tehran bus-driver's union. In an
interview with FDI Executive
Director Kenneth R. Timmerman,
Osanloo said riot-control police
were using rubber bullets and water
cannons with scalding water in
unsuccessful attempts to disperse
some 5,000 protestors at Tehran
University, as they started to move
toward the Supreme Leader's
compound. The protestors chanted
slogans calling on Khamenei to leave
Iran, and for an end to the Islamic
Republic, he added. The BBC Persian
service has been leading the way in
posting
verified videos of the
protests, but the Voice of America
is slowing catching
up.

Dec. 29. 2017: #IranProtests
explode on Twitter. The
second day of nation-wide anti-regime
protests has been propelled
by on-scene Twitter videos reposted
and spread by Iranians
overseas. This is a huge
development. Protestors are chanting
"Death
to the Dictator," and
anti-clerical slogans. In
Kermanshah, in northwestern Iran,
riot police have cracked down on
protestors, but in other cities they
have stood by and observed. Will
freedom-loving countries come out in
support of the people of Iran? Stay
tuned!

Dec. 20, 2017: UN human rights
experts call on Iran to annul
death sentence. Four
experts with the United Nations
Office of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights issued a
statement today calling on Iran to
rescind the death sentence a
kangaroo court handed down on
Swedish-Iranian academic and
disaster medicine expert, Dr.
Ahmadreza Djalali. The experts
signing the
statement included the
current UN Special Rapporteur for
Human Rights in Iran, Pakistani
human rights advocate, Ms. Asma
Jahangir.

Dr.
Djalali was arrested in April
2016 during a visit to Iran
and held for ten months
without charge, when he was
repeatedly "threatened with
torture and other forms of
ill-treatment," the statement
read. In January 2017, he was
taken before Branch 15 of the
Revolutionary Court in Tehran
without a lawyer, and informed
he was being accused of
"espionage."

Since then, the Iranian regime has
fabricated charges that Dr.
Djalali was spying for Mossad
against Iranian nuclear scientist,
and forced him recently into what
appeared to be a drug-induced
confession aired on Iranian state
television earlier this week (see
photo). According to Djalali's
wife in Sweden, Vida Mehran-nia,
the forced confession came after
he wrote her from prison that he
had been arrested for "refusing to
spy for the [Iranian] intelligence
ministry."

"I
don't understand why they insist
on accusig him of spying for
Israel," she
said. "I think they aired
this [his videotaped 'confession']
after Ahmadreza's letter was
publishing stating that he was
arrested because he did not agree
to cooperate with Iran's
intelligence ministry."

FDI
joins the United Nations
OHCHR, Amnesty
International, and other
human rights organizations,
in calling on the Iranian
regime to FREE DR.
DJALALI, yet another
innocent pawn in the hands of
cynical intelligence
operatives seeking to put
pressure on Iranian
expatriates and their host
governments.

In
a
dramatic press
conference held at Andrews Air Force base on
Thursday, the U.S. Permanent Representative to
the UN, Nikki Haley, accused Iran of violating
its commitments under UN Security Council
resolution 2231, the instrument that
officializes the deadly “Iran deal” known as
the JCPOA. Standing in front of a giant piece
of fuselage from an Iranian Qiam missile shot
down by Saudi Arabia as it was hurtling toward
the Riyadh civilian airport recently, Haley
said, “Just
imagine if this missile had been launched at
Dulles Airport or JFK, or the airports in
Paris, London, or Berlin. That’s what we’re
talking about here. That’s what Iran is
actively supporting.”

Iran
delivered Qiam missiles to Houthi
rebels in Yemen, who have launched
it repeatedly against civilian
targets in Saudi Arabia. “What is
most revealing about this missile is
what’s not here,” Haley said. “It is
the large stabilizer fins that are
typically present on these kinds of
missiles. The Iranian Qiam missile
is the only known short range
ballistic missile in the world that
lacks such stabilizer fins and
includes nine valves that you will
see running along the length of the
missile. Those valves are
essentially Iranian missile
fingerprints.”

Haley
invited reporters to walk around an
array of parts from the Qiam missile,
including pumps bearing the tell-tale
stamp of Shahid Bagheri Industires,
the Iranian manufacturer (see photo at
right).

A
Pentagon spokesperson, Laura Seal,
provided more detail about three other
Iranian weapons systems captured by
the Saudis from Houthi rebels: an
anti-tank guided missile, the Toophan;
the Qasef-1 armed attack
drone; and the guidance system from an
Iranian Shark-33 boat.

“This is an
explosive-laden, unmanned boat used in an
attack the Saudi Arabian frigate HMSal
Madinah,” Seal
said.

The Department of Defense has made additional
videos and images of the captured Iranian
weapons available
here.

Dec.
12, 2017: Quds Force Commander
Dares U.S. and Israel to Act.
Quds Force commander Qassem
Suleymani has been acting with
increasing brazenness in recent weeks,
ever since he established a new
command headquarters just inside the
Syrian border with Iraq at Abu Kamal.
Earlier this month, he dispatched
Iraqi Shiite militia chief Qais-al-Khazali
on a tour of Syria and Lebanon, to
demonstrate the opening of Iran’s
long-sought “land bridge” across Iraqi
territory through Syria and Lebanon to
Israel’s northern borders. (See
photo, left)

Khazali was
detained by U.S. forces in Iraq in
2007 for his role in murdering
American soldiers but was subsequently
released by Prime Minister Malaki at
the insistence of Suleymani.

Khazali traveled in
an armed convoy on open roads during
daylight hours, accompanied by
Hezbollah troops. He visited Damascus,
then Beirut, where he met with
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Then he accompanied Hezbollah
militiamen to their positions along
the Israeli border, even filming a
portion of his tour and broadcasting
it in Iraq. According
to the Israeli-based Debkafile,
Suleymani sees Khazali’s trip as the
first step toward sending some 15,000
Iraqi Shiite fighters to positions
facing Israel’s northern borders.

Khazali
more frequently appears in militia
uniform than in clerical garb these days
(see photo, right).

In a second brazen
move, Suleymani ordered Hamas military
leader Marwan Issa on Monday
to begin a new wave of missile attacks
against Israel, purposefully using an
open phone line to deliver the
message. “The Iranians wanted the
Israeli and Egyptian intelligence
agencies eavesdropping on incoming and
outgoing phone calls to and from Gaza
to hear Soleimani pledge full Iranian
support for any military action
conducted against Israel,” according
to the Debkafile.

Suleymani continues to travel outside
of Iran in defiance of a UN travel
ban, reaffirmed in UN Security Council
Resolution 2231, that forbids him and
other Quds Force leaders from leaving
Iran.

Dec.
7, 2017: Student Day marked
by anti-Rouhani protests. On the
anniversary of Iranian Student Day and a
hundred days into his second term in office,
President Hasan Rouhani has yet to fulfill
many of the promises he made to university
students during his 2013 election
campaign, such as relaxing restrictions on
university students who express dissent.
Student Day is the anniversary of the murder
of three university students at Tehran
University on December 7, 1953 by police.
Every year during “Student Day” week,
university students hold demonstrations, as
well as conferences attended by influential
speakers.According to
the website Jame’e
Farda, in the month of October alone,
at least 150 doctoral students were either
deprived of continuing their education or
expelled due to their student
activities or political views. Now, after
five years, university students are openly
criticizing the Rouhani administration at
protests across the country for the lack of
substantial change on university campuses.
Some of the
slogans chanted by the students were;
"[We] won't be silenced despite threats and
summoning of students," "forced labor before
graduation, unemployment after education,"
"students are suppressed all across Iran
from north to south," "girls' dormitories
are prisons," and "free education is our
right, forcible tuition is neither justice
nor legal." Students at Shahid Beheshti, and
Allameh Tabatabaei universities protested tuition
hikes among other practical issues. In
social media posts, students can be seen
taking part in a celebration with Bandari
music and dancing at Najafabad
University in Esfehan. (link below)

Dec.
1, 2017: Iranian freedom activists
call for investigation of Ahmed Mola
assassination. More
than 100 Iranian pro-freedom
activists and writers have called on
the Dutch government to launch an
official investigation into the
assassination of Ahwazi activist Ahmad
Mola, who was gunned down in the Hague
on Nov. 8. They also questioned why
the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) was the
only opposition group not to have
condemned Mola's murder, a hinting
that others than the Iranian regime
may have been responsible for the
gangland-style killing.

Nov.
14, 2017: Alleged Quds Force officer
claims he assassinated Iranian
dissident in Holland. An
opposition internet site known for
having excellent sources within the
IRGC, Amad
News, quoted an unnamed IRGC
intelligence officer who
claimed he had murdered Iranian
dissident, Ahmad Mola in
Holland. Mola was gunned down at point
blank range in front of his house in
Holland, and was a known Ahwazi Arab
activist. If true, this is only the
second regime assassination of a
dissident in Europe since the end of
the Mykonos killings in 1997. (In
April 2017, Saeed
Karimian, owner of Dubai-based
GEM TV, was murdered
in Istanbul, also apparently by
regime agents).

Aug.
7, 2017: Turkey colludes with
Iran--again.Can anyone doubt
Turkish President Erdogan's true
colors when he threatens
an Iranian journalist, living as
a political refugee in Turkey, with
expulsion to Iran? At every turn,
Erdogan opposes freedom and embraces
dictators, from his alliance with
Qatar, to his backing of ISIS, to his
collusion with the Islamic State of
Iran. FDI appeals to freedom-lovers
everywhere to support this brave women
and her struggle for freedom.

May 21, 2017: Thank-you for your
help, in particular to our
activists in Houston and the Los
Angeles and Orange County area. Read
the article by Adam Kredo at
the Free Beacon, "Iranian regime
agents operating polling stations
across the United States," on FDI
efforts to get the federal government
to enforce the law.

May 18, 2017 -
COMPLETE ELECTION POLLING STATION LIST NOW
AVAILABLE. Download
here and contact your local
authorities to SHUT THEM DOWN. [NOTE:
Fearing demonstrations by the opposition and
action by U.S. authorities has led the regime to
delay posting addresses for Los Angeles, Orange
County, CA, and Houston, TX.

A broad array
of Iranian opposition groups and leaders have
called on Iranians to boycott the upcoming May
19 presidential [s]elections, in which
candidates previously selected by the regime are
engaging in a state-sponsored masquerade of
democracy.

In a
transparent attempt to bolster the legitimacy of
these sham elections, the Iranian regime has
announced that it will open 56 polling places
across the United States where Iranian citizens
can vote, 17 of which have been identified.

Today, we asked President
Donald J. Trump to shut down these illegal
polling places and to take “take
all appropriate legal action against those
involved in renting, providing, manning or
otherwise servicing these facilities" under
the International Emergency Economic
Powers Act (IEEPA).

In our letter
to the President, we noted that 13 CFR 560.512
prohibits Iranian diplomats in the U.S. from
carrying out real estate transactions and
requires that any financial transactions
conducted for official business be run through
an account specifically licensed by the Treasury
Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

“To our
knowledge, OFAC has not licensed any
Iranian-government controlled account to be used
to rent these 16 facilities, making all
transactions relating to these facilities
illegal,”we wrote.

Therefore, we
are asking the administration to freeze all
bank accounts used to rent facilities as
illegal polling stations, and to deem all
individuals involved in renting or providing
such facilities as "agents of the government
of the Islamic Republic of Iran" and freeze
their assets under IEEPA.

The laws of the
Islamic Republic require that representatives of
the Guardians Council and the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs supervise overseas balloting
locations. But U.S. law requires Iranian
diplomats in the United States to apply to the
State Department for permits to travel beyond a
25-mile radius from their diplomatic post.

In our letter
to Secretary Tillerson, we asked him to confirm
that no State Department permits have been
issued to Iranian diplomats to travel beyond the
25-mile radius from their diplomatic posts in
Washington, DC and New York, in order to man
these polling places.

“In the event
permits were granted by holdover employees from
the previous administration, we would ask that
you discipline them appropriately for actions
contrary to the interests of the United States
and contrary to the policies of this
administration,”we
wrote.

We appended to
our letters a listing of the sixteen addresses
identified by the Islamic Republic Interests
section. (A 17thpolling
station is to be set up in the Interests section
and would thus appear to be legal).

As we were
preparing our letters to the President and to
the Secretary of State, the Islamic regime
Interests section removed those addresses, and
placed “pins” for an additional 32 polling
station locations identified in our appendix,ultimately releasing a table of 56
citieswhere
polling stations would be established.

“This practice
is consistent with behavior by the Interests
Section in 2009, when fear of demonstrations and
other action against the balloting by opposition
groups in the United States led it to mask
specific polling addresses until just hours
before they opened,” we wrote.

“We thank you
in advance for looking into this matter and feel
confidant that millions of Iranians who reject
the tyranny of the Islamic regime are looking up
to you with hope that you will support their
quest for freedom,” the letters concluded.

March 31,
2017:
Activists call
on President
Trump to
appoint FDI
President as
head of U.S.
international
media. More
than 170
Iranian human
rights
activists,
broadcasters,
and former
political
prisoners have
signed a joint
letter urging
President
Trump to
appoint
Kenneth R.
Timmerman as
Chief
Executive
Officer of the
Broadcasting
Board of
Governors
(BBG), the
U.S.
government
agency that
manages the
Voice of
America and
America's
surrogate
media."Mr.
Timmerman has an illustrious career of more than
30 years as an investigative journalist,
broadcast personality, author, and human rights
advocate. His experience with the Voice of
America and the “freedom radios” of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty goes back decades.," the
activists wrote.

The
letter
describes the
"deformation"
of America's
freedom
broadcasts in
recent years,
with
particular
dysfunction
apparent at
the Voice of
America's
Persian
Service and
Radio Farda,
the Iranian
"freedom"
radio
headquartered
with Radio
Free
Europe/Radio
Liberty in
Prague. "U.S.
international
broadcasting
desperately
needs reform.
Mr. Timmerman
is the right
person for the
job," the
activists
write. View
the complete
letter here.

March
26, 2017: Iran
Central Bank
reeling from
Luxembourg
court
decision. The
Central Bank
of Iran (CBI,
aka Bank
Markazi), is
reeling after
a Luxembourg
court agreed
on March 22 to
uphold a
freeze on
accounts worth
$1.6 billion
it held with
the
Clearstream
clearing
house. The
freeze
resulted from
court
proceedings
filed by
attorneys
representing
victims of the
September 11,
2001 attacks
on America,
who had won
two separate
judgments
totaling more
than $10
billion in
damages from a
U.S. District
court. In a
letter to the
Prime Minister
of Luxembourg
on March 2,
posted on line
by
the NY Times,
lawyers for
the plaintiffs
detailed the
extraordinary
measures Bank
Markazi had
taken in
conjunction
with
Clearstream to
shield its
assets from
U.S. courts.
"Clearstream's
business
methods have
led to
accusations
that it
facilitates
money
laundering and
other
financial
crimes for its
clients," the
lawyers wrote.
The judgments
are known as Havlish
v. Islamic
Republic of
Iran, and
Hogland v.
Islamic
Republic of
Iran.

March 23,
2017: Congress
introduces new
Iran
sanctions. Bipartisan
coalitions in
the House
and the Senate
today
introduced new
legislation to
expand
sanctions on
the Islamic
State of Iran
for its
continued
development of
destabilizing
ballistic
missiles. The
legislation
comes in the
wake of
multiple
Iranian
ballistic
missile tests,
seen by
members as
violations of
UN Security
Council
resolutions.
“The new
administration
took a
positive step
last month
when it
responded
swiftly to an
Iranian
missile test
with sanctions
targeting 25
individuals
and entities
involved in
this dangerous
program.
More, however,
must be
done.
That’s why
this bill
takes a
proactive
approach,"
said Rep. Ed
Royce,
chairman of
the House
Foreign
Affairs
Committee.

March
6, 2017: State
Department
releases 2016
human rights
report. Secretary
of State Rex
Tillerson
released the
annual human
rights report,
which in
previous years
has been
delayed for
political
reasons, with
a
long section
detailing
Iran's
ongoing
violations of
international
human rights
standards.
This year's
reports
includes
accounts of
the execution
of 20 Iranian
Kurds in Rajai
Shahr prison
on Aug. 2,
2016, on
charges of
"enmity
towards God,"
and
extrajudicial
killings of
"unarmed
Kurdish
smugglers or
border
couriers" in
regions
bordering
Iraq,
Afghanistan,
and Pakistan.

Feb. 28, 2017:
The Crimes of
Qassem
Suleymani. FDI
Director says
Quds Force
commander has
"more American
blood on his
hands than any
terrorist"
after Osama
Bin Laden.
"It's time
[the United
States] shut
him down for
good." From today's
Washington
Times.

Feb. 22, 2017:
Iranian-American
political
prisoner now a
"hostage,"
regime says. Gholamreza
"Robin"
Shahini, a
U.S. citizen
detained in
Iran since May
2016, has gone
on a hunger
strike in Evin
prison for the
past six days,
after his
guards
confiscated a
notebook he
had been
keeping and
said that he
would be
treated as a
"hostage."
Family members
in contact
through
intermediaries
with Shahini
believe he has
been
transferred to
a different
prison and is
now being held
in solitary
confinement.
As we reported
last year (see
Aug. 13, 2016
entry), the
State
Department
under John
Kerry refused
to work for
Shahini's
release, after
paying $1.7
billion to the
Iranian regime
for earlier
hostages.

Feb. 20,
2017: FDI
Director on
Radio Israel:
The
era of America's capitulation to Islamic
Iran is over. In a sweeping
thirty-minute interview, Radio Israel
Persian Service director Menashe Amir asked
FDI Director Kenneth Timmerman what changes
he expected to see in U.S. policy toward
Iran with the incoming Trump administration.
Timmerman said he believed those changes
would be sweeping, and would range from
stepped up military pressure (not
capitulating to Iranian provocations), to
support for the pro-freedom movement through
public diplomacy and a revitalized Voice of
America Persian service and other
broadcasting. Listen to the complete
interview, in English and in Persian, here:
Feb.
20, 2017:
Iranian
Dissidents
Demand
Investigation
into Islamic
Regime's
Secret U.S.
Lobbying
Network. A
group of 100
prominent
Iranian
dissidents are
demanding a
Congressional
investigation
into Iranian
regime
penetration of
the Voice of
America's
Persian
service, the
Free Beacon reported
today. The
dissidents
wrote U.S.
lawmakers to
denounce
infiltration
of VOA by the
National
Iranian
American
Council, NIAC,
a pro-Tehran
lobbying groupwhose
founders run
an influential
consulting
firm in Iran
called Atieh
Bahar that
introduces
Western
companies to
Iranian
markets. The
complete
letter with
the list of
signatories is
here.

Feb.
18,
2017:
Gold star
widow, Iraq
vet, denounce
Iranian regime
crimes against
US. In a
stunning
4-minute video
from the Islamic
State of Iran
Crime Research
Center, a
wounded
American
warrior asks
why the
Iranian regime
was killing
Americans in
Iraq and a
gold star
widow asks why
the United
States
government
rewarded her
husband's
killers. A
MUST SEE.

Feb.
10, 2017: The
World's
Biggest
Islamic State
turns 38 -
let's make
this year it's
last.On
Friday, the
Islamic
“Republic” of
Iran
celebrated its
38th birthday
by busing
hundreds of
thousands of
Iranians to
mosques and
public squares
to chant
“Death to
America.”
Americans
should care
about this
ill-fated
anniversary
because the
Tehran regime
continues to
kill American
troops on the
battlefields
of Iraq and
Aghanistan. As
many as 1500
U.S. soldiers
were killed by
Iranian
operatives
using
Explosively
Formed
Penetrators
(EFPs) in
Iraq alone.
Here is the
testimony of a
gold star
wife, who lost
her husband to
an Iranian
bomb in 2007,
as presented
by the
newly-created
Islamic
State of Iran
Crime Research
Center.

In his column on the Islamic State of Iran
anniversary, scholar Michael
Ledeen claimed that the latest regime
bluster against the Trump administration's
threats to "put Iran on notice" showed that "the
regime is intensely worried that the Trump[ team
is preparing serious action."

Feb.
9, 2017:
Support
building to
put IRGC on
State
Department
terrorism
list. Senator
Cory Booker
(R, Co) has joined
the growing
ranks in
Congress who
favor the
State
Department
designating
the IRGC as a
state-sponsor
of terrorism.
Such a step
would entail a
significant
increase in
U.S. sanctions
against the
IRGC, as well
as secondary
sanctions
against
foreign
companies
doing
business.

At a Feb.
6, conference
in Washington,
DC, the CEO of
the Foundation
for Defense of
Democracies,
Mark Dubovitz,
revealed
that FDD had
compiled an
open source
data base of
over 850 IRGC
entities and
front
companies that
could be hit
with new
sanctions.

Feb. 3, 2017: Putting Iran on Notice - when
uncertainty is our friend. FDI's CEO,
Kenneth R. Timmerman, spells
out the type of measures the Trump
administration might adopt to intensify pressure
on the Iranian regime. These include: stepped up
Persian-language broadcasting, banning Iranian
diplomats from international travel, military
steps to curtain IRGC-QF expansion into Iraq,
Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, and more.

Jan.
14, 2017: Dual-nationals go on hunger strike
in Evin Prison. The Islamic state of
Iran has stepped up its campaign to arrest
dual-nationals visiting Iran, and terrified
family members back home have only reluctantly
come out of the shadow to speak of their
plight. Lebanese-born U.S. green card holder Nizar
Zakka was arrested on September 18,
2015, after being lured to Iran with an
invitation from an Iranian vice president to
address a conference on sustainable
development. One year later, he was sentenced
to 10 years in prison. Since December 8, he
has been on
hunger strike to protest the regime's
refusal to allow him consular visits from the
Lebanese embassy.

Swedish resident Ahmadreza
Jalali, right, an expert in emergency
disaster medicine, also visited Iran on an
official invitation. He was supposed to address
a conference at Tehran university. Instead,
intelligence ministry agents arrested him on
April 24, 2016. “With each individual grabbed
and locked up, without even the pretense of due
process, the Iranian Judiciary’s disregard for
the rule of law becomes more blatant” said
Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the
Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. These arrests
of Iranian dual-nationals amounted to "hostage
taking," he added. Jalali went on hunger strike
on Christmas Day to protest his arrest.

Jan. 8, 2017: Rafsanjani dies of heart
attack; Khamenei loses cover. Former
president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani died
today of a heart attack at the age of 82. A
central figure in the Islamic Republic
hierarchy since its inception, Rafsanjani
tricked every
U.S. president since Ronald Reagan into
believing he was a "moderate," somehow opposed
to the "hard-liners" in charge of the regime's
affairs. In fact, Rafsanjani operated at the
core of the regime and supported its doctrine
of absolute clerical rule and its terrorist
operations, from the taking of U.S. hostages
in Lebanon to the bombing of U.S. servicemen
in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, including Iran's
support for al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot.

Rafsanjani was indicted in Argentina for his
role in the AMIA bombing that killed 86
Argentinean Jews in 1994, and was also cited
in the 1996 Mykonos murders in Germany for his
role in directing "hit squads" that
assassinated Iranian opposition leaders living
overseas. He was also named as a defendant in
Havlish v.
Islamic Republic of Iran, litigation
brought by family members of 9/11 victims
against the Iranian regime that led to a $6
billion judgment against the regime and
against Rafsanjani personally.

Rafsanjani invited nuclear
scientists to return from exile in the mid-1980s
and is widely viewed as the "father" of Iran's
covert nuclear weapons program, having famously
declared his belief that Iran could destroy
Israel with a single nuclear weapon. ("The use
of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy
Israel completely, while the same against Iran
would only cause damages. Such a scenario is not
inconceivable," he
said in a sermon at Tehran University on Dec.
14, 2001).

The wily pseudo-moderate provided cover to
Khamenei and other "hard-liners" by offering
them a life-line to the West, and is widely
credited with having pushed hard for the Iran
deal with the United States and the EU-3.

Nevertheless, in recent years his power has been
challenged by the IRGC, which arrested his own
children (since released) and protege's,
including members of Atieh Bahar, a consulting
company established by Iranians in the United
States with the goal of helping foreign
companies do business in Iran.

Rafsanjani's reach continues to be on display in
the United States, where his sympathizers
include the editor of Voice of America's Persian
News Network, Mohammad Manzarpour. When
Rafsanjani's death was announced, Manzarpour
changed his Facebook
page to a well-known Koranic verse used
to express sympathy for someone who has just
died.

Jan. 5, 2017: Conservative Leaders Join FDI
in calling for Iran Asset Recovery plan. In
a letter to House Foreign Affairs Committee
Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) released today,
prominent conservative leaders sketched out a
plan to step up pressure on the Islamic state
in Iran through legislation that would allow
Iranians whose property was confiscated by the
Islamic regime to pursue restitution or
compensation through U.S. courts or other
means.

Many Iranian-Americans have tried to sue the
Islamic regime in Tehran to recover their
stolen assets, but have failed in U.S. courts
and in the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The
Hague. A successful Iran Assets Recovery Plan
must include Iranians who became U.S. citizens
after their assets were seized.

Jan.
4, 2017: Dissident Ayatollah released on
medical leave. Ayatollah Seyed
Hossein Kazemini-Boroujerdi, jailed since 2006
for challenging the doctrine of absolute
clerical rule at the core of the Islamic state
in Iran, was released
today to seek medical treatment, after
posting bail of 300 million toman (approximately
$100,000).

Regime thugs stormed Boroujerdi's compound in
October 2006, ransacking his house and arresting
him and many family members and supporters.
Sentenced to ten years in prison by the Special
Court of the Clergy, he should have been
released last year. Extensive torture and a
failure by prison authorities to provide him
with medical treatment have caused serious
injuries, including heart problems and such severe
back pain he has not been able to walk for
months. FDI and other human rights groups
repeatedly have called for Boroujerdi's release.

Dec. 16, 2016: After Aleppo, IRGC leaders
vow to intervene in Bahrain, Yemen.After the massacre of Aleppo, Iran's
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps leaders are
vowing to overthrow the Emir of Bahrain and
take over Yemen. "The victory in Aleppo will
pave the way for liberating Bahrain,” deputy
IRGC commander Hossein Salameh told IRNA. He
added, “the people of Bahrain will achieve
their wishes, the Yemeni people will be
delighted, and the residents of Mosul will
taste victory. These are all divine promises."
For anyone who thinks the Iranian regime was
intending to stop with its support for Syria's
Assad, think again: they believe they are on a
roll, and that the United States "will do
nothing," as Ayatollah Khomeini liked to say.
Under Obama, the U.S. government has
done nothing except engage in elaborate
hand-wringing. As these IRGC statements show,
weakness is provocative when dealing with
totalitarians.

The IRGC's mission is
spelled out in the
preamble of the Islamic Republic of
Iran constitution, under the heading "An
Ideological Army."

"The Army of the
Islamic Republic and the Corps of
Guards of the Revolution (IRGC) ...will be
responsible not only for the guarding and
preserving the frontiers, but also
with the task of the ideological mission of
jihad in God's path, that is fighting for
extending the sovereignty of God's Law
throughout the world (this is in accordance
with the Koranic verse "Prepare against them
whatever force you are able to muster, and
strings of horses, striking fear into the
enemy of God and your enemy, and others
besides them" [8:60]).

The Koranic inscription
comes from the Chapter of War Booty (al
Anfaal), and is a well-known incitement to
Holy War against the non-Muslims.

Dec. 12, 2016: Persian
News Nightmare: America's
'Voice' has been transformed
into the Voice of Tehran. It's
time to shut it down. In
a column in today's Washington
Times, FDI President Kenneth
R. Timmerman argues that Iranian
regime agents have so thoroughly
penetrated the Voice of America's
Persian News Network that it can
no longer be saved. "It’s
time to shut it down and save the
taxpayers some money and our nation from
public embarrassment," he wrote.

Nov. 21, 2016: British-Iranian dual-national
jailed while on Iran visit at "breaking
point," family says. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
a project manager with Thomson Reuters
Foundation jailed while on a visit to Iran in
April, has reached the "breaking point" after
a five-day hunger strike. Her Iranian family
was summoned to Evin Prison last Friday for an
"emergency visit," and were shocked at her
dramatically weakened state, her British
husband told
The Guardian. Mrs. Zaghari-Ratcliff is
just one of a growing number of dual nationals
arrested, jailed and tortured by the Islamic
State of Iran on allegations of formenting a
color revolution among Iranian youth.

Richard Ratcliff, her
husband, told The
Daily Mail that he believed she was being
used as a "bargaining chip" over Iranian claims
it was stiffed on a £500 million tank deal to
buy British Centurion tanks under the Shah.

Nov. 19, 2016: Three
Christians sentenced to 80 lashes for taking
communion wine. The Islamic State of
Iran continues to intimidate, jail, and
torture Christians, especially former Muslim
believers who have joined the rapidly growing
house church movement in Iran. The latest
victims, Yaser Mosibzadeh, Saheb Fadayaee, and
Mohammed Reza Omidi, have been sentenced
to 80 lashes after they were arrested in
May taking communion at a church gathering in
Rasht.

Nov. 17, 2016: Pro-Tehran lobby vows to
fight Trump agenda. In an email to
supporters, Tehran's chief lackey in the
United States, Trita Parsi, warned
of a "nightmare scenario" becoming
reality under President-Elect Donald Trump.
Parsi decried the President-Elect's opposition
to the failed Iran nuclear deal, and claimed
the Trump team planned to initiate a "Muslim
registry," a false claim fabricated
out of whole cloth by the New York Times
that was immediately debunked by a transition
spokesperson. In his alarmist email, Parsi
called on supporters to donate to his
organization, which a federal judge determined
was a lobbying front for the Iranian regime.

The transition team reportedly is considering
re-instating
a visa system for non-citizen aliens from
certain countries modeled on the
National Security Entry-Exit Registration
System (NSEERS) that the George W. Bush
administration put into effect shortly after
the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Persistent attacks
from the ACLU and Muslim Brotherhood front
organizations such as CAIR eventually led the
Department of Homeland Security to scrap
NSEERS in 2011.

Nov. 16, 2016:
Iranian nationalists send support letter to
President Elect Trump. A group of
Iranian nationalists have sent a letter of
support to President-Elect Trump, congratulating
him on his election and encouraging him to focus
on the plight of the Iranian people. "As you are
aware, under President Obama’s terms in office,
the struggles of the Iranian freedom movement,
the plight of the ethnic and religious minority
and Afghan refugees were all ignored," they
wrote. "The Iranian people need moral support to
be able to move towards regime change." Read
the full letter here.

Nov. 10, 2016:
Just say no... to doing business with Iran.
In a powerful oped, retired Staff Sgt.
Robert Bartlett, whose skull was split open by
an Iranian-produced
Explosively-Formed-Penetrator (EFP) while he
was on patrol in Iraq, argues
that U.S. companies should reject
Iranian overtures to do business with a regime
that is the world's leading state sponsor of
terrorism. Sgt. Bartlett is a founding member
of United Against Nuclear Iran's Veterans
Advisory Council. "Over the years, Iran has
been responsible for killing more than 1,000
U.S. service members," according to a
statement by UANI as part of its latest
campaign to convince U.S. companies to shun
business opportunities in Iran.

Oct.
30, 2016: Iranians protest regime at King
Cyrus tomb. Thousands of Iranians
gathered outside the tomb of King Cyrus in
Pasargadae on Friday, Oct. 28, to celebrate
the birth of the Iranian king who freed the
Jews in 539 BC. "Iran
is our country, Cyrus is our father," they
chanted.

Fearing a massive anti-regime protest,
the IRGC sealed off the city two days before
the rally, but were not successful at
preventing a large crowd from gathering
outside the tomb and chanting anti-regime
slogans, including
the name of the son of the former Shah,
Reza Pahlavi. Cyrus is held dear by
Iranians not just as the symbol of past
greatness, but also for the principles of
tolerance and respect for human rights
enshrined in the Cyrus cylinder, now housed in
the British Museum.

Oct. 19, 2016: UN Rapporteur releases
latest human rights report. Dr. Ahmed
Shaheed, whom the Iranian regime is trying to
force out as the United Nations Special
Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran, has
released his latest periodic report, which
remains critical of the regime for
mistreatment of its citizens. You can download
the full report as
a PDF here, or visit Dr.
Shaheed's website for more.

Oct. 3, 2016: Those family ties...Fatimeh
Mugniheh (left), daughter
of former Hezbollah military leader Imad
Mugniyeh, and her "friend," Zeynab Suleymani,
daughter of Quds Force leader Qassem Suleymani,
take in a film in Tehran. (Original Twitter pic
here).
Mugniyeh was known to have taken an Iranian wife
and spoke fluent Farsi in addition to Dari,
linguistic skills that helped him during many
missions to Afghanistan for Suleymani's Quds
Force, where he helped al Qaeda plot the 9/11
attacks. Mugniyeh's involvement in the 9/11 plot
was first revealed on pages 240-241 of the 9/11
Commission report, which described his presence
on multiple flights from Damascus and Riyadh to
Tehran between October 2000 and February 2001,
conveying future hijackers to their Iranian
handlers. Families of 9/11 victims won
a $6 billion judgment against the Iranian
regime in a U.S. federal court because of Iran's
material support to the 9/11 plot.

Bill Nojay 1956-2016

FDI Statement
on the death of board member Bill Nojay:

“The
pro-freedom movement in Iran has lost a
great champion.”

Sept. 14, 2016 IFDI) - The
FDI Board and supporters of a secular, free Iran
were shocked to learn of the death of board
member Bill Nojay, who was found dead of a
gunshot wound at his family’s cemetery plot in
Pittsfield, New York on Friday.

FDI president Kenneth R.
Timmerman spoke with Nojay just days before his
death. “We were embarking on a new project, and
Bill was enthusastic and upbeat,” Timmerman
said.

Nojay was elected to the New
York State legislature in 2012, and won
his primary for re-election on
September 13, four days after his death.

"Bill devoted a huge amount
of his time to serve others, without a thought
to any reward,” Timmerman said. “I am honored to
have served with him on the board of FDI in the
service of freedom.”

Nojay worked with FDI to
promote the cause of victims of the Iranian
government, individuals whose loved ones were
murdered, or people subjected to extrajudicial
detention and torture.

“We were working with more
than 200 victims of Iranian state ter0n U.S.
courts because they were not U.S. citizens at
the time the crimes against them were
committed,” Timmerman said.

“Many of these individuals
have contacted me since
learning of Bill’s death to express their dismay
and sadness at the loss of such a stalwart
champion of freedom,” Timmerman added.

In 2007, Nojay joined
Timmerman at a 3-day
effort in Paris, known as Solidarity
Iran,to build a broad coalition among diverse
Iranian opposition groups. “Bill was always
generous to volunteer his time and his skills to
help Iranians in need,” Timmerman said.

“The pro-freedom movement in
Iran has lost a great champion.”

[Photos: Bill Nojay and FDI President
Kenneth R. Timmerman at the 2007 Solidarity Iran
conference in Paris. Bottom: Timmerman,
Nojay, Rep. Michelle Bachman, and former CIA
Director R. James Woolsey, at the National Press
Club, 2013.

After its success
in forcing the resignation of Ahmed Shaheed,
the trail-blazing UN Special Rapporteur for
Human Rights in Iran, the Islamic regime in
Iran is now hoping it can count on U.S. help
to elect a lackey to succeed him.

But that may be easier
said than done.

Dr. Shaheed has issued scathing
reports on the systematic human rights
violations by the Iranian regime, focusing
international attention on the persecution
of women, children, ethnic and religious
minorities, as well as the political
opposition.

His focus on the regime’s
human rights record got him banned from Iran
just months after he took office in August
2011. Despite multiple requests since that
time, the regime has never allowed him to
visit or Iran. Dr. Shaheed was re-elected to
his sixth one year term in March 2016.

FDI sources believe that
the Iranian regime only succeeded in getting
Dr. Shaheed removed from his position
because of active assistance of Secretary of
State John Kerry. “For Secretary Kerry,
human rights issues were among the first
things to be sacrificed… to facilitate the
normalization of relations with the Iranian
ayatollahs,” one opposition activist said.

“For several years, this
administration has black-listed those
Iranians and Iranian-Americans – and
Americans, too – who opposed the Islamic
Republic, not only from access to American
policy makers, but from all the media it
controlled, in particular the Voice of
America,” the activist added.

Human rights advocates
and at least two U.S. elected officials have
been promoting Roozbeh Farahanipour, who
came to the United States as a political
refugee in 1999, as a replacement for Dr.
Shaheed.

Mr. Farahanipour, who
runs a business in Los Angeles and was
recently re-elected to his fourth term on
the Westwood
Neighborhood Council, advocates for a
“secular republic” to replace the Islamic
regime in Iran. He tells FDI that he would
continue the work of Dr. Shaheed to expose
the barbaric practices that the Islamic
Republic considers to be “normal”
expressions of Islamic Sharia law.

In his letter
of
support to the U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations, California State Senator
Joel Anderson commended Mr. Farahanipour for
his “unyielding commitment to raising
awareness of the injustices that plague his
home country and his ability to overcome
immense opposition and retaliation in the
battle for Iranian human rights.”

In a
parallel letter, U.S. Representative
Gus Bilirakis (R, Fl) identified
Farahanipour as “an invaluable advisor on
all issues regarding the government of the
Islamic Republic of Iran,” and commended him
as “an international leader in the Iranian
cultural renaissance movement.”

Farahanipour has won
support from a broad cross-section of
Iranian diaspora leaders who agree with him
and Dr. Shaheed that universal standards
should govern the United Nations effort to
monitor human rights practices in Iran, not
separate Sharia-law standards.

“I majored in Sharia law
as a law student in Tehran, and it’s clear
that Islamic law and human rights can never
be bedfellows,” he told FDI.

Dr. Shaheed most recently
aroused the ire of the Iranian regime for
criticizing laws that created two new
categories of offensives unknown in other
countries: “Mohareb” (literally, one who
fights against God), and “Mofsed fel-arz”
(“corruptor on earth.”). Both are punishable
by death in today’s Iran and have been used
as excuses to execute thousands of political
prisoners over the past 37 years.

In a
July 12, 2016 statement to
a hard-line website, Dr. Mohammad
Javad Larijani, chairman of the Iranian
regime’s “Human Rights High Command,”
dismissed Dr. Shaheed’s criticism by saying,
“What business of yours are these things?
These issues are solely the concerns of our
laws.”

After enumerating several
Islamic punishments enshrined in current
Iranian law, Larijani concluded: “Before
anything else, Ahmed Shaheed must understand
the laws of Islam…”

Speaking to a
pro-Rouhani website, Larijani’s deputy
for international arffairs, Kazem
Gharib-abadi, was more explicit. “One of our
tasks at the Human Rights High Command is to
influence and reform [Western] human rights
documents, because Islamic Human Rights must
be recognized and must be reflected in
[international] human rights documents.”

In recent discussions
with the European Union, the Iranian regime
has insisted that the next Special
Rapporteur come from a Muslim country and
have a good knowledge of Sharia law,
informed sources tell FDI.

Three candidates in
addition to Farahanipour fit that bill: the
former head of Pakistan’s Human Rights
commission, Ms.
Asma Jilani Jahangir, a fierce
opponent of Islamic blasphemy laws; Sudanese
lawyer Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, who
authored a
2012 study on human rights law as it
applied to the Dharfur conflict; and Turkish
women’s rights advocate Yakin Erturk, who
was the UN Special Rapporteur for Violence
against Women from 2003-2009 and more
recently called the Iranian regime’s war on
women a
“bloody stain” on its human rights
record.

The pro-Tehran lobbying
group NIAC has been promoting American Neil
Nicks, director of Human Rights Promotion at
Human Rights First, an organization that
seeks to make the human rights
of LGBT people “a foreign policy
priority of the U.S. government. Hicks previously
worked as a researcher for the Middle
East Department of Amnesty nternational in
London, and before that, as a project
officer at Birzeit University in the West
Bank.

The Human Rights Council
is expected to meet during the upcoming
session of the UN General Assembly in New
York and elect on a new rapporteur for Iran
sometime between September 13 and September
25. Permalink.

Aug.
13, 2016: Hard-line publication claims
visiting American was opposition James
Bond. Why was yet another
American taken hostage in Iran? Hard-liners
predictably claim he was a U.S. spy--and now are
saying he's an agent of the exiled opposition. (Permalink)

Gholamreza "Robin" Shahini traveled to Iran this
May to visit his family in the northern city of
Gorgan after graduating from San Diego State
University with a degree in international
security and conflict resolution. He had gone
back to school after years of running a pizza
shop, and was 46 years old when IRGC goons burst
into his mother's home, presented a search
warrant, and took him into custody.

For two weeks, his girlfriend in the United
States, who was in contact with his family in
Iran, had no news what had happened to him. The
search warrant presented to Reza's sister
accused him of unspecified "crimes against the
state." The LA Times cited
a friend who speculated on Facebook that
he might have been detained because of online
comments criticizing the human rights record of
the Islamic regime.

The
Iranian regime continues to arrest
U.S.-Iranian dual nationals despite the
hostage swap and ransom payment last January.
Shahini is the
third U.S.-citizen currently
held in Iran. The regime has also arrested
Canadian and British citizens in recent
months.

Secretary of Sate John Kerry and his
spokesperson, John Kirby, apparently just
wish Shahini would go away. Both have
refused to answer questions from
reporters. The State Department did not return
several calls by FDI asking for comment.

"All I hear from Secretary Kerry is 'human
rights, human rights,' and yet when an American
citizen is taken hostage in Iran, what do they
do? Nothing," Shahini's girlfriend told FDI.

Shahini's arrest was first
reported on July 21. Three days later,
former intelligence minister Gholam-Hossein
Mohseni-Eje'i, now spokesman for the Judiciary,
confirmed
his arrest.

But it wasn't until last Wednesday (Aug. 10)
that his lawyer was allowed to visit him, after
he had a medical emergency. "Robin has severe
asthma and they took away his medication," his
girlfriend said. "I sent all that information to
the lawyer. He is allergic to cigarette smoke.
So then they put him in the place in the jail
where all the criminals go to smoke!"

Shahini told his lawyer that his interrogators
were accusing him of being a spy for the United
States.

A
hard-line Iranian internet publication published
on Friday two
photographs of Shahini, apparently taken
from his laptop, which had been seized by the
authorities. The first shows him shaking hands
with former president Abolhassan Banisadr in
Banisadr's residence in Versailles, France. The
second shows him at a conference table to Reza
Pahlav, son of the former shah.

The article claims that Reza was "commissioned
by the National Council to reconcile Bani Sadr
to the Pahlavis." The article also claimed that
Reza traveled to Iran at the request of the U.S.
intelligence services "on a mission from the
U.S. government... to create chaos in the
country."

The full name of Reza Pahlavi's organization is
the Iran
National Council for Free Elections. It
promotes reconcillation and cooperation among
all democratic factions of the Iranian
opposition, as does FDI.
Neither Banisadr nor Reza Pahlavi has confirmed
the authenticity of the photographs, and
Shahini's girlfriend told FDI that he had never
been a supporter of either politician. But a
2009 trip to Iran during the Green Movement
protests "was a turning point for Robin" and
made him more aware of the human rights
situation inside Iran.

In an ominous development, Shahini's family say
he has been placed in the Quarantine ward in
isolation from other prisoners. Families of
other political prisoners note that they have
been called to visit their loved ones in the
isolation ward shortly before they were
executed.Permalink

(Permalink)Five
years into a ten year jail sentence for
espionage, former nuclear scientist Shahram
Amiri was executed on Saturday by hanging and his
body returned to his family.

Amiri “disappeared” while
making the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in
2009. The Iranian regime accused the United
States of kidnapping him because he was
engaged in sensitive nuclear research.
Later, Mr. Amiri surfaced in the United
States, and published reports said he was paid
$5
million by the U.S. government for
providing information on Iran’s nuclear
program.

In July 2010, Mr. Amiri
had remorse, after several emotional phone
calls with his five-year old son, who he had
left behind in Iran. He traveled from
Arizona to the Iranian Interests Section in
Washington, DC, asking to be taking back to
Iran.

Those events led to crudely-coded email
exchanges between Jake Sullivan and his
boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
that were released in July 2015 under the
Freedom of Information Act.

“The gentleman you have talked to Bill Burns
about has apparently gone to his country’s
Interests Section because he is unhappy with
how much time it has taken to facilitate his
departure,” Sullivan
wrote in an email to Mrs. Clinton
private email server on July 12, 2010. “This
could lead to problematic news stories in
the next 24 hours. Will keep you posted.”

This is the type of email exchange,
containing classified information, that Mrs.
Clinton’s aides never should have
communicated over an unclassified system,
giving rise to the charge by FBI Director
Comey that Mrs. Clinton had been “reckless”
in her handling of classified material.

So reckless, in fact, that now someone
clearly referred to in her emails is dead,
executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“Something dramatic happened that caused the
regime to execute Shahram Amiri on Saturday,
half-way through his ten-year sentence for
espionage,” said Roozbeh Farahanipour, an
Iranian human rights activist who has been
nominated to become the next United Nations
Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran.

Did the release of the Hillary Clinton
emails provide the Iranian regime with some
proof it had previously lacked that Shahram
Amiri was a U.S. spy? If so, it shows once
again the reckless disregard of Mrs. Clinton
and her aides for protecting U.S. national
security - and indeed, the lives of
individuals who had a secret relationship to
the U.S. government.

Aug. 5, 2016: Iranian state
television showed footage of ransom payment.
Donald Trump got into hot water last week
when he claimed he had seen television
footage of the $400 million cash payment to
Iran made by the United States government in
January. While he subsequently said he had
been mistaken, and had seen U.S. TV footage
of the aircraft carrying the hostages
arriving in Geneva, he may have been
right to begun with.

Iranian state TV included pictures of the
palettes with shrink-wrapped cash in a
documentary called "Rules
of the Game" it aired on February 15.
"A narrator, speaking in Persian, describes
a money-for-hostages transaction over video
clips of a plane on an airport tarmac in the
dead of night and a photo of a giant
shipping pallet stacked with what appear to
be banknotes," The
Guardian newspaper reported.

Yesterday, Pastor Saeed Abedini, one of the
three U.S. hostages who was released on
January 17, told
Fox News that his captors told him
they were waiting for another plane to
arrive before letting his plane take off.

July 27, 2016: Iran
arrests another dual-national. The
Islamic state of Iran has stepped up arrests of
visiting dual-nationals, apparently in an effort
to reassert the regime's authority over a
population increasingly critical over ongoing
corruption scandals. The latest victim,
Iranian-American Reza "Robin" Shahini, had never
been politically active but nevertheless erased
several years of Facebook posts so not to provide
the regime with any reason for arresting him. It
didn't work. He now
joins a growing number of expat Iranians
languishing in Evin prison. So much for the
"kinder, gentler" face of the regime under Rouhani
and the nuclear deal.

Meanwhile, the corruption scandals inside Iran
continue to generate unrest, as does the regime's
recruitment of young Afghan men to fight
Iran's battles in Syria. Iranians are
increasingly furious as more
details of the payslip scandal emerge,
showing that grossly-incompetent employees at a
state insurance earn phenomenal salaries,
because of political ties to Rouhani-regime
insiders.

July 21, 2016: Saudi FM blasts Iranian
consul for Iran-al Qaeda ties. In
a remarkable exchange Saudi Foreign Minister
Adel al-Jubeir demolished a senior Iranian
diplomat for Iran's ongoing ties to al Qaeda.
Today's forum, sponsored by the Belgian foreign
ministry and hosted
by the Egmont Institute, took place a day
after the United States Treasury designated
three additional al Qaeda members as
global terrorists, two of them working from
Iran. (For more on the Treasury designations,
see here
and here).
In response to a harangue by the Iranian
diplomat that Iran couldn't possibly be
sponsoring al Qaeda because of their sectarian
differences, al-Jubeir calmly expounded a series
of facts, starting with Iran's sponsorship of
the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, and leading up
to the 2003 Riyadh bombings and beyond. "The
order to blow up three housing compounds in
Riyadh, in 2003, was made by Saef al Adel, Al
Qaeda's chief of operations, while he was in
Iran. We have the phone conversation on tape. We
didn't make this up," he said. "Ronald Reagan
used to say, facts are stubborn things, They are
stubborn. Because you can't get around them."

Saudi Arabia has captured Iranian agents on its
soil, and has seized explosives Iran attempted
to smuggle into Saudi Arabia for additional
terrorist attacks. But Saudi wasn't the only
target, he noted. "Iranian agents have been
linked to terrorist attacks in Europe, to
terrorist attacks in South America. We didn't
make this up. This is the world. This is
evidence." This remarkable six minute exchange
is worth viewing in its entirety.

May 13, 2016: Mullahs re-arrest Christian
pastor and his wife. Yousef
Naderkani, who was arrested in 2009 and
condemned to death for apostasy for renouncing
Islam, was rearrested on Friday along with his
wife, Tina Pasandide Nakarkhani and three
members of their house church. According to Christian
Solidarity Worldwide, they were
interrogated for several hours but ultimately
released later in the day. The status of the
other detainees remains unclear.

Pastor Youssef was acquitted of the apostasy
charge and released from jail in September 2012,
after refusing to recant his Christian faith. He
was rearrested a first time on Christmas Day
2012 and held for more than two weeks.

"The continued harrassment of Christians by the
Islamic regime authorities in Iran because of
their religion shows once again that this regime
does not respect the most fundamental human and
civil rights of its own citizens," said FDI
President Kenneth R. Timmerman. "Western
governments would do better to hold the Iranian
regime accountable for its egregious human
rights violations and its ongoing support for
international terrorism, rather than seek
illusive profits by doing business in Iran."

May 1, 2016: First Labor
Day labor protests in 8 years;
tens of thousands take to the street. Tens
of thousands of workers marched through the
streets of Tehran on Friday, the first Labor Day
protest in eight years. Bahar
News reported that close to 10,000 workers
demonstrated against the Rouhani government in
front of the state-affiliated Workers House and
then made their way toward Palestine square.
Protesters held
posters demanding insurance for
construction workers, job security in the
workplace, and a ban on hiring foreign workers.
The protests were led by Hassan Sadeghi, head of
the state-sanctioned Union of Veterans of the
Labor Community, and included leaders and
members of the Asalooyeh Guild, a newly-formed
"unofficial" union.

Comments from readers thanking
the website for reporting on the protests
received over 500 likes.More photos from the
protests are here.

Labor activist Mansour Osanloo, the
former head of the Tehran Bus Driver's Union who
fled Iran three years ago and now lives in the
United States, told FDI that labor unrest has
spread to Iran Khodro, the largest auto maker in
the country. "The Sepah Pasdaran owns the
petrochemical industry and the car plants,
through Khotam ol-anbia," Osanloo said. "These
people are not qualified. They are not managers.
They have stolen so much from these companies
they can no longer pay the workers. The whole
system is corrupt."

Over the past year, labor unrest has spread
through the oil industry in Khouzestan and into
Iranian Kurdistan, Osanloo said. "Without
sanctions relief, the regime was in big trouble.
Don't give them the money!" Osanloo said.

April 27, 2016: Iran Oil Exports soar, but
Leader blasts U.S. for failed sanction
relief. The latest
figures, released by Reuters today, show a
50% leap in Iranian oil exports in March
to its primary Asian markets, China, South
Korea, Japan and India. Oil shipments reached
1.56 million b/d, up from 1 million b/d for
March 2015. The most notable increase was India,
which had stopped importing Iranian oil because
of its inability to find a payment mechanism.

Despite the dramatic upsurge in Iranian oil
exports, regime leaders in Tehran said the U.S.
was not doing enough to provide sanctions relief
promised under the nuclear agreement. Both
Khamenei and Rouhani blasted the United States in
separate statements for the recent Supreme
Court ruling that allows victims of Iranian
state terror attacks in Beirut and Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia to
collect some $2 billion frozen in U.S.
accounts held beneficially for the Iranian
Central Bank. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif went
even further, calling a recent decision by a
U.S. court that Iran must pay damages for its
role in the 9/11 attacks "the
height of absurdity." Until now, the
Iranian regime has simply ignored U.S. lawsuits
stemming from its terrorist activities,
resulting in a string of default judgments
against Iran that allow plaintiffs to freeze and
potentially seize assets.

April 15, 2016: Dissident ayatollah
escapes alleged assassination attempt. Dissident
ayatollah Kasemeini-Borujerdi, who has been
jailed since 2006 for his refusal to accept the
doctrine of absolute clerical rule, narrowly
escaped an assassination attempt in Evin prison,
according to his European representative Maryam
Moazen. Citing reports from inside Evin, Mrs.
Moazen told FDI that Iranian regime intelligence
agents gave Borujerdi poisoned food that caused
"severe pains, in particular in his legs," and
affected his eyesight. The attempted food
poisoning occured on April 7, following 440
days of solitary confinement, and was not
the first assassination attempt against the
dissident ayatollah while in prison. It also
came at the end of Borujerdi's 11 year sentence.
He was scheduled to be released earlier this
month but continues to be held in Evin, where
the Special Court for the clergy is now
attempting to file a new case against him for
"heresy," Mrs. Moazen said.

March
30, 2016: U.S.
and allies say Iran missile-launches
violate UN resolution. In
a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,
the U.S. and its European allies blasted Iran
for recent ballistic missile tests "in defiance"
the UN Security Council resolution that ratified
last year's nuclear deal. UNSC Resolution 2231
called on Iran to "refrain" from testing
ballistic missiles designed with the capability
of delivering nuclear weapons. The letter
stated that Iran had achieved that key
capability with its improved Qadr missiles, test-fired
on March 9. The Qadr-F reportedly had a
range of 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles), and the
Qadr-H had a range of 1,700 kilometers (1,056
miles), bringing not just Israel but targets in
Europe within range.

March 23, 2016: State Department confirms
additional payments to Iran. In
a startling announcement that Secretary Kerry
somehow forgot when he was promoting the Iran
nuclear deal, the State Department continues to
negotiate with Iran disputes going back to the
1979 hostage crisis, and foresees making
additional payments to Iran beyond the $1.7
billion ransom payment in January. The news
emerged in a letter from the State Department in
response to an inquiry from Rep. Mike Pomeo,
R-KS, that Pompeo's
office released today. The letter noted
that the January payment liquidated a $400
million Trust Fund on deposit with the U.S.
Treasury from Iran for Foreign Military Sales
purchases in the United States, plus interest,
but that "fact-intensive claims" involving "over
1,000 separate contracts between Iran and the
United States" remain outstanding and are now
the subject of new negotiations. The letter is here (pdf file).

March 21, 2016: DIA document shows Iran's
involvement in Benghazi. The
Iranian Connection to the Benghazi attacks is
finally coming to light, from today's
Washington Times. An analysis of the
involvement of the IRGC Quds Force in the
attacks was ordered by then DIA Director LTG
Michael Flynn. While the results remain
classified, Gen. Flynn has confirmed that he
issued the tasking order for an all source
review of what the defense intelligence
community knew about the Iranian presence in
Benghazi and involvement in the attacks. View
the original DIA documenthere
[pdf document]

March
19, 2016: U.S. arrests Babak Zanjani crony
in Miami; unseals federal indictment. Reza
Zarrab, 33, was
arrested on charges of money-laundering
and sanction violations, and flown over the
weekend to New York. A sealed indictment, handed
down in July 2015, was released that detailed
the allegations against Zarrab, which included
laundering over $130 million of Iranian oil. You
can read the unsealed indictmenthere
[pdf document].

March
6, 2016: Ajad's sanctions-buster-in-chief
condemned for fraud: The
official media in Iran says that Babak Zanjani,
who has boasted of laundering billions of
dollars of oil sales through Western sanctions
regimes, has been condemned
to death. We'll see. More likely is that
he hasn't turned over the keys to his overseas
empire to his handlers, who now sing for
Rouhani....

March
2, 2016: Bin Laden says Iran is "our main
artery for funds..." In a
dramatic new revelation, so far under the radar
of the national media, the Director of National
Intelligence has released a letter from al Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden to a follower,
admonishing him for threatening to attack Iran.
The letter was among a cache of documents seized
during the 2011 raid by Seal Team 6 that killed
Bin Laden and was posted
yesterday to the DNI website. In the
letter, Bin Laden reveals that Iran "is our main
artery for funds, personnel, and communication,
as well as the matter of hostages." Read
more at The Tower.

March 1, 2016: American terror victims to
collect $9.4 million from Iran. In
a landmark
victory after years of litigation, U.S.
victims of Iranian state-sponsored terror
attacks have won the right to collect $9.4
million from a long-frozen asset in California
belonging to the Iranian regime.

Feb.
24, 2016: Regime Vice-president reveals
execution of village's "entire male
population": Shahindokht
Molaverdi, vice president for Women and and
Family affairs, revealed that regime agents had
executed the entire male population of a
population in Sistan-va-Baluchestan province, on
allegations of drug trafficking. "Society
is responsible for the families of those
executed," she
told the Mehr news agency.

Feb.
11, 2016: Today the 1st Islamic State
Celebrates its Anniversary. ISIS,
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, is the
late-comer to the world of Islamic-inspired
murder and mayhem. The regime that invented the
genre will celebrate its 37th anniversary on
Feb. 11. It’s official name: the Islamic
Republic of Iran. Read more from FDI president
Kenneth R. Timmerman's column in today's Frontpage
magazine.

Feb. 10, 2016: Boroujerdi supporters
appeal to Congress. Supporters
of jailed dissident Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini
Boroujerdi have sent an an empassioned letter to
Reps. Pompeo, Zeldin, and LoBiondo, who are
seeking to travel to Iran to monitor the
upcoming "elections." In the letter, they note
that Boroujerdi, who was jailed along with
thousands of supporters in 2006, is one of the
longest suffering political prisoners in Iran.
"His crime: advocating the separation of
religion and state and defending democracy and
freedom," they write. Boroujerdi's health has
"reached a precarious state, because of diseases
caused by constant beatings and other forms of
torture over the past ten years," they added.
And yet, the regime continues to deny him
medical treatment.

Boroujerdi has particularly angered the regime
because as a cleric, he was expected to support
the velayat-e faghih, absolute clerical rule. In
fact, there are so many clerics who reject the
clerical dictatorship that the regime has
established a Special Court of the Clergy to
punish them. Boroujerdi's supporters asked the
three Republicans to visit Boroujerdi in prison,
and if possible to bring a physician with them.
Read
the letter.

Feb. 5, 2016: Conservative Republicans
want to visit Iran. Three
conservative members of Congress, Reps Mike
Pompeo, Lee Zeldin, and Frank LoBiondo, have
sent a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei and IRGC
Commander Gen. MOhammad Ali Jafari, asking for
visas so they could come to Iran to observe the
upcoming Majlis elections on Feb. 26 and meet
with IRGC leaders. Pomeo said the three
Republicans asked to meet the head of Iran's
nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi,
whom the Iranians have kept off-limits to
international weapons inspectors, and with
Iranian-American hostage Siamak Nemazi. They
also wanted information on the missing former
FBI agent, Robert Levinson.

" If Iran is truly a partner
in peace, as President Obama and Secretary Kerry
claim, then Iranian leaders should have no
problem granting our visas and arranging the
requested agenda. I look forward to
receiving a timely response from Iran,” said
Pompeo, a member of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence. “Americans
deserve credible, first-hand confirmation of
what present-day reality is in Iran, regarding
the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal,
status of American hostages and foreign policy
objectives of Iranian leaders,” Zeldin added.
The full text of the letter is here.

Jan. 29, 2016: Italy veils statutes to
please Rouhani. The
Italian government shrouded nude Roman
statutes when Islamic Republic
president Rouhani came to town on his
shopping spree this week, apparently
to "spare" him embarrassment. While
Rouhani reportedly did not ask for the
veiling, he said, "I
thank you for this." The Iranian
women's group, My Stealthy Freedom,
criticized Italian media and female
politicians who went along with this
expression of dhimmitude: "This
censorship reminds us of the way the
Iranian regime has been forcing
millions of women in Iran to cover up.
The politicians of our country,
regardless of whether a woman is
Muslim or not, force women in Iran to
cover up and their justification is,
‘You, as a woman, should be shrouded
in front of my eyes in order not to
provoke me’. This way of thinking is
completely unacceptable.” The Persian
Facebook link is here.

Jan. 17, 2016: Welcome to the Banana
Republic. Read FDI
President Ken Timmerman's take on the hostage
for prisoner swap at
Frontpage magazine.

In
sweeping moves that gave the lie to repeated
assertions by Secretary of State John Kerry that
there would be no “comprehensive” deal with
Iran, the United States on Saturday announced
its acceptance of IAEA assertions that Iran had
complied with the JCPOA, lifted sanctions on
more than 400 Iranian government entities and
individuals, and swapped U.S. citizens held
hostage by Iran for Iranian nationals convicted
of violating U.S. export control laws.

There was so much news that
the media has had a hard time keeping up. An
overall guide by the Treasury Department of
sanctions relief can be found here.
The list of Iranian government entities removed
from sanctions is
here. A profile of seven of the
Iranians released by the U.S. in exchange for
U.S. hostages in Tehran is
here.

While FDI welcomes the
release by Iran of U.S. citizens it had taken
hostage, we deplore the cynical and misguided
trade of Iranian nationals who were arrested and
convicted for violating U.S. export control
laws. There can be no equivalence, moral or
otherwise, between hostages, seized for purely
political purposes, and individuals who broke
the law and were afforded due process under a
democratic system of laws.

The consequences of the
lifting of U.S. sanctions will be felt far and
wide. One group of Americans may pay an
extraordinarily high price for the misguided and
dangerous U.S. opening to the Islamic Republic
of Iran: victims of Iranian state-sponsored
terrorist attacks.

Under sanctions relief, Treasury has removed
sanctions and asset blocks on the property of Assa
Corp and Assa Ltd. These front
companies were created in 1989 to disguise the
40% ownership interest of the Iranian
state-owned Bank Melli in a Manhattan skyscraper
located at 650 Fifth avenue that continues to be
the subject of litigation between terror-victim
claimants and the Alavi Foundation, which federal
prosecutors allege to be an Iranian
government entity. In November, the 2nd
Circuit court of appeals chastened U.S.
prosecutors for mishandling the case against
Alavi, and is expected to send the case back to
the District court for trial. Meanwhile, Assa
Corp, which was never the subject of a final
judgment in the lower court, may simply move
for dismissal of the charges against it,
effectively putting its 40% share of the $800
million building beyond the reach of the terror
victim creditors.

Jan.
14, 2016: Iran gloats over captured
U.S. sailors. Senior
Iranian officials gloated over the way their
government put captured U.S. sailors on public
display. In initial photographs and video
footage released by State media, the 10 U.S.
sailors were seen with their hands over their
heads, making them appear like prisoners of war.
“This is a sign of our might,” said
deputy foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araqchi,
a senior member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating
team. Despite the fact the sailors were seized
on Tuesday, apparently in international waters
off the coast of Kuwait, President Obama failed
to even mention them during his State of the
Union speech that night. Iran agtreed to release
them the next day after “the Americans
humbly admitted our might and power,” IRGC
deputy commander Hossein Salami
boasted to the Iranian media.

IRGC naval
commander, Ali Fadavi, revealed that
the carrier USS Truman “showed unprofessional
moves for 50 minutes after the detention of
the trespassers,” presumably meaning that the
Truman tried to challenge the Iranian ships
that had seized control of the two U.S.
coastal patrol boats. ““The US and France’s
aircraft carriers were within our range and if
they had continued their unprofessional moves,
they would have been afflicted with such a
catastrophe that they had never experienced
all throughout the history,” Fadavi
boasted.

Jan. 11, 2016: Iran tops world with 1084
executions in 2015. The
Boroumand Foundation estimates
that Iran executed 1084 people in 2015, the
highest number in more than 25 years and the highest
per capita execution rate in the world. A
detailed listing of 964 of those executed can be
found at the Iran
Human Rights Documentation Center. So much
for the "moderate" President Hassan Rouhani, whose
primary goal has been to pull the wool down over
the eyes of the West.

The Guardian in London published striking
photographs (left) by Sadegh Souri of juvenile
girls on death row in Iranian jails. Under Islamic
law, girls convicted of serious crimes as
juveniles and sentenced to death remain in jail
until they turn 18, when the death sentences are
carried out.

Jan. 4, 2016: Saudi
paper reveals al Qaeda asked ISIS not to
attack Iran.Al
Sharq al Awsat reveals that ISIS spokesman,
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, attacked al Qaeda leader
Ayman al-Zawahiri because of his ties to Iran. In
a message titled, "Iran's Heavy Debt to al-Qaeda,"
he revealed that ISIS "did not strike the Shiites
in Iran since its inception... pursuant to al
Qaeda's order to maintain its interests and lines
of supply in Iran."

Dec.
23, 2015: Prisoner of faith, Pastor
Farshid Fathi, released after 5 years.
Jailed during
MOIS raids that targeted Christian leaders
on Dec. 26, 2010, Pastor Farshid was held for more
than 15
months in Evin prison without trial before he was
brought before a Revolutionary court in Tehran. He
was eventually
sentenced to six-years for "action against
national security," cooperating with foreign
organizations," and "evangelism," and moved to
Ward 350 in Evin. Pastor
Farshid's letters to his family and to the
faithful have been shared through social media
around the world.“We are deeply
grateful for your faithful prayers for Farshid
while he has been in prison,” Elam Ministries,
whose mission is to help expand the church in the
Iran region, said
in a statement. “We would like to request
that you continue praying for Farshid today and in
the coming weeks. Please pray especially for
protection, his family and his adjustment to life
outside prison." In a lead editorial on his
release, the
Wall Street Journal-Europe noted that
"evangelical Christianity is exploding in Iran
today, with conversion estimates ranging from
300,000 to half a million."

While FDI is grateful that Pastor Farshid can now
join his family, we have no illusions that his
release, cynically timed around the Christmas
holidays, portends any change of heart of the
Iranian regime. The explosion
of the house church movement, including inside the
Revolutionary Guards, prompted former president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad early in his presidency to vow
he would "stop
Christianity" in Iran. FDI has heard
anecdotal evidence suggesting that as many as 2
million former Muslim believers have embraced
Jesus in Iran. We fully
expect that the regime will continue to arrest
house church leaders and persecute former Muslim
believers. Thus, your continued vigilence,
prayers, and actions on behalf of political
prisoners in Iran is needed now more than ever.

Dec. 21, 2015: Sec/State John Kerry
pledges to override visa restrictions. In
a letter to Islamic Republic foreign minister
Javad Zarif, U.S. Secretary
of State Kerry pledged to use a presidential
waiver to override a provision in the new Omnibus
budget package that requires Europeans who have
visited Iran to apply for U.S. visas. Zarif
recently told a pro-Tehran
interviewer that the visa requirement would
"violate" the nuclear agreement (JCPOA). Before
the digital ink was even dry on the interview,
Kerry fired off his letter, saying that the US
intended to lift all sanctions on Implementation
Day, as required by the non-binding JCPOA.
• Iran hacks US power grid. An
Associated
Press investigation has found evidence that
Iranian cyber attackers have penetrated US power
plants and downloaded "Mission Critical"
engineering drawings that experts say could be
used to knock out power to millions of homes. In
an apparently related incident, Iranian
hackers penetrated the computer control system of
a small dam less than 20 miles from New York City
in 2013, "sparking concerns that reached to the
White House," the Wall
Street Journal reported. Iranian hackers are
also believed to have hacked major U.S. banks, and
a much larger dam in Oregon.

Dec.
15, 2015: Under intense US pressure, IAEA
closes Iran investigation. Despite
the
report from IAEA director Yukio Amano
finding that Iran had not fully cooperated with
the IAEA regarding the past military dimensions
(PMD) of Iran's nuclear program, the Agency's
Board voted to close the nuclear file so the JCPOA
could go ahead. Iranian officials, not
surprisingly, heralded the cave-in by the IAEA
Board as a "huge achievement" (Salehi). FM
Zarif said the Board's move "officially
cancelled the Board of Governors' 12 previous
resolutions relating to Iran's nuclear program."

Dec. 7, 2015: New Tehran mural slanders
U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima. More from
President Obama's new "friends" in Tehran, a
gigantic street caricature of the famous Iwo Jima
memorial in Washington. The intent is clear: to
poison the mind of ordinary Iranians to the brave
soldiers carrying our flag and wearing our
uniform.

This is, of
course, the same regime that murdered 241 U.S.
Marines in Beirut in October 1983 and boasted
about chasing America from Lebanon with its tail
between its legs.

Dec. 1, 2015: Regime hangs
Iranian-American. A
human
rights group has disclosed that the regime
executed an Iranian-American reportedly wanted for
murdering another Iranian citizen in California.
The State Department confirmed that it learned of
the death sentence on October 28, and asked the
Swiss embassy in Tehran to request a stay of
execution, without success. The executed man,
Hamid Samiee, was sentenced by Branch 71 of
Tehran's Criminal court and hung in Rajaj Shahr
prison in Karaj on Wednesday, November 4. The
Washington Free Beacon confirmed
the execution today with the Department of
State.
Nov. 30, 2015: Obama with 1979
hostage-taker at Paris climate summit;
disgraceful.President Obama
appeared with the former spokesperson for the 1979
"student" hostage-takers, now a member of the
Islamic regime in Tehran, on stage with world
leaders at the Paris "climate change" summit. This short
video, compiled by an FDI supporter,
identifies Masoumeh Ebtekar and replays portion of
an interview she gave a US TV station during the
hostage crisis, when she stated that she could put
a gun to the head of the hostages and kill them.
Her son is currently studying in the United
States.

Nov. 20, 2015: Family members of Serial
Murder Victims accuse: Family
members of Parvaneh and Dariush Forouhar and other
victims of the 1998 serial murders accuse the
regime of continuing to cover-up the truth about
the murder of their loved ones. In
a joint statement, they said there had been
"no judiciary examination of the murders, or if
there was, it was derailed." Instead, the regime
followed with "cover-ups, corruption, threats, and
crackdown" on those who tried to expose the truth,
such as journalist Akbar Ganji, who was murdered
after he had been jailed for six years for writing
an expose of the serial murders.

Oct. 28, 2015: Rafsanjani admits to
pursuing nuclear weapons, calls on
Khamenei to respect JCPOA. In
an extensive interview with a Persian-language
website called Iran's Nuclear Hope, former
president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani reveals
that the Islamic regime actively pursued nuclear
weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, and received
help from Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qader
Khan. (FDI founder and CEO Kenneth Timmerman first
revealed the Iran-Pakistan connection, and the
agreement Rafsanjani's government signed with A.Q.
Khan in 1987, and was nominated for the Nobel
peace prize in 2006 because of this and subsequent
investigative work on Iran's then-secret nuclear
weapons program).
In the interview, Rafanjani reveals that all of
Iran's plutonium research and infrastructure was
for "military purposes," and that he had intended
to build the original Arak heavy water plant at
Alamut in Qazvin province, where Iran had other
clandestine nuclear weapons-related facilities
that the IAEA tried unsuccessfully to inspect in
February 1992. "[W]hen we started the [nuclear]
work, we were at war, and we wanted to have such
an option for the day our enemies wanted to use
nuclear weapons. This was [our] state of mind, but
things never become serious," Rafsanjani said.

He also openly criticized Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei for jinning up hostility to the JCPOA in
the Majles and imposing nine new conditions the
West must meet before Iran would carry out its
obligations under the JCPOA. ""Eighty to 90
percent of the people agree to the process of the
JCPOA, and want to get out [of the nuclear
dossier]," he said.

Rafsanjani underscored the fact that Iran stands
to benefit enormously under the deal, gaining
access to "cutting-edge technology" that the
Western powers have committed to provide to
convert the plutonium reactor Arak facility to
non-plutonium fuel. "[T]his is an advancement for
us." He also revealed that international sanctions
have done tremendous damage to Iran's economy and
threatened to spark a revolt against the regime,
which was saved in the nick of time by the JCPOA.
H/t MEMRI for the excellent
English translation. The original Persian is
here.

Oct.
27, 2015: Regime arrests NIAC co-founder.
In a twist that
shows the supremacy of supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, the regime has arrested Siamak Nemazi,
the co-founder of the pro-regime U.S. lobbying
organization, NIAC. According to Hassan Dai, who
won a significant libel lawsuit NIAC brought
against him for identifying them as the "Iran
lobby" in the United States, Nemazi was arrested because he and NIAC consistently
“lobbied in favor of a faction of the regime,”
which upset the Mullahs because it would only be
acceptable to “lobby
for the whole regime.”Also today, the
regime sentenced a former member of Parliament, Esmail
Gerami Moghaddam, to six
years in prison. Moghaddam was arrested in
July 2015 when he returned from six years of
doctoral studies abroad, and is a former spokesman
of the Etemad Melli Party of former Green movement
leader, reformist mullah Mehdi Karroubi.
Prosecutors also sentenced poets Fatemeh Ekhtesari
and Mehdi Mousavi to 10 years in prison plus 99
lashes for "shaking
hands with someone of the opposite sex."

Iran is on track to execute more than 1,000 people
this year, a record that UN special Rapporteur for
Human rights in Iran, Dr Ahmed Shaheed,
called
"an unprecedented assault on the right to
life."

Oct. 21, 2015: State television unveals
underground "missile city."
In an unusual move, Iranian state television
broadcast footage of an inspection tour by IRGC
Brig. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Commander
of the IRGC Aerospace Force, of a
what purported to be a vast underground storage
site for Shahb-3 missiles. The state TV report,
which shows the IRGC general passing troops in review in front of a long
line of Shahab-3 missiles on mobile launchers,
does not identify the location of the storage
depot, but suggests that it is just one of many
such depots that the IRGC have built in recent
years. Gen. Hajizadeh is best known for
publicly rejecting Western attempts to require
Iran to allow inspection of its military sites
under the JCPOA, saying that such demands would
receive "a
response with lead."

The broadcast
report came a week after Iran announced it
had test-fired a new medium-range missile, the
Emad, which Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein
Dehghan said was "the first ballistic missile
developed by Iran that can be precision-guided
until it reaches its target." Western analysts
have estimated that it can carry a
terminally-guided nuclear warhead weighing 750
kilograms to targets 1,700 kilometers (1,100
miles) away. However, the fact that Iran would
develop a liquid-fueled successor to the Shahab-3,
rather than more solid-fuel missiles,
suggests to some analysts that the financial
bite of international sanctions also reached the
IRGC missile corps, causing them to focus on less
expensive liquid-fuel missiles, which take much
longer to prepare for launch than solid fuel
rockets.Full
video of the inspection tour is
here, with more stills and the Persian
language IRINN report here.

Oct. 14, 2015: Iran "testing U.S. resolve"
with missile test. House
Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Rep. Ed Royce
(R, CA), wrote
President Obama today, warning that Iran's
recent launch of a precision-guided long-range
ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear
warhead was "testing United States resolve in the
wake of the nuclear agreement." Calling the test
"destabilizing," Royce said it must be met with "immediate
action, both unilaterally and at the UN Security
Council, to make clear that Iran remains
prohibited from developing this dangerous
technology."

Sept. 23, 2015: IRGC intelligence unit
steps up arrests. The
IRGC's own intelligence unit, which falls under
direct control of the Supreme Leader and not the
government of President Hassan Rouhani, has
stepped up arrests since Rouhani took office,
according to reformist activist Ali Afshari. The
IRGC Protection and Intelligence Directorate has
focused recently on monitoring anti-regime
bloggers and has arrested more than 100 bloggers
and internet activists since Rouhani took office.
They are also
believed to have been behind the arrest of
Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who was
recently sentenced to six years in prison for
espionage.

Sept. 10, 2015: Speaker Boehner changes
course on Iran deal. In
a statement released
this afternoon, Speaker Boehner announced a
change of course in how the House will pursue its
review of the JCPOA. After the closed door
Republican conference meeting yesterday, opponents
of the deal, led by the Chairman of the House
Republican Israel Caucus, Rep. Pete Roskam of
Illinois, convinced Boehner to take action this
week to "make clear President Obama did not submit
all the required documents" to Congress under the
Corker-Cardin bill, and prohibit the President
from "lifting, suspending, or modifying sanctions
on Iran." On Thursday afternoon took the first of
these steps by passing a resolution contending
that the White House had not submitted all the
necessary documents to trigger the 60-day review
process. Follow-on are expected on Friday in the
House, and next week in the U.S. Senate. More from
The Hill.

Sept. 9, 2015: Thousands gather in
Washington, DC for #NoIranDeal rally.
Headlining Wednesday's rally at the foot of the
Capitol Building were presidential candidates
Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. Also appearing
were Mark Levin, Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny
Beth Martin, TV host and author Glen Beck (photo,
right), and many others. Citizens United president
David Bossie called on Speaker Boeher and Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell to kill the deal. Former VP
candidate Sarah Palin explained that the Obama
White House was in violation of the Corker-Cardin
bill because it failed to submit all the documents
and side agreements, including the IAEA inspection
protocols. (Andy McCarthy spelled out this
argument in
a detailed column on Sept. 5 in the National
Review.)
Sept. 8, 2015: Four killed in PJAK/IRGC
clashes. State-run
IRNA reported
clashes between PJAK and the IRGC in West
Azerbaijan province on Tuesday during which two
PJAK fighters and two IRGC soldiers were killed.
The latest incident followed an another attack a
week earlier in Kermanshah, in which PJAK fighters
killed a Revolutionary guard soldier. So far, PJAK
has not commented on the clashes. But the Party leadership issued
a warning on August 26, following the
execution in prison of PJAK activist Bêhrûz
Alxanî, that it would conduct retaliatory attacks.
Indeed, PJAK regularly "punishes" the IRGC when
its activists are jailed or murdered, in keeping
with the "retribution"
doctrine of the YRK,
its defense force.

Sept. 4, 2015: Sen. Cardin comes out
against the Iran deal. In
an oped in the Washington Post, Cardin (D, MD)
explained why he was voting against the deal and outlined
new legislation he intends to introduce that
would clarify and impose clear limits on the JCPOA.

Aug. 18,
2015: Sen. Menendez comes out against the
Iran deal. In
a speech at Seton Hall University in New Jersey,
Sen. Bob Menendez, a former chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, came
out against the Iran deal, citing the need
for Democrats to act according to JFK's Profiles
in Courage, not the party line. Other key
Democrats, including Menendez's successor as SFRC
chairman, Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland,
have not yet announced their position on the deal.

Aug. 17, 2015: White House pressing former
flag officers and left-wing rabbis to
support Iran deal.
• The flag officers' letter was outed
by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who
declined to sign on.
• Blogger Jerome
Gordon noted that the letter signed by 340
rabbis was authored by a little
known Socialist group known as Amienu,
who have a long history of supporting the
Iranian regime as well as the "Israeli version
of the Occupy Movement."
• Subsequent to his original post, ZOA issued a
news release revealing that the President of
Ameinu, Kenneth Bob, was also Treasurer of J
Street, a left-wing group financed
in part by George Soros, while the majority of
the signatories were members of the "J Street
Rabbinic Cabinet." J Street works hand in glove
with NIAC, the Iranian regime's de facto
lobbying arm in the United States, the
press release said.

Aug. 14, 2015: Iranian dissidents oppose
Iran deal. A
coalition of Iranian former political prisoners
and human rights activists has issued an open
letter opposing the Iran nuclear agreement. "We
represent a diverse array of Iranians who hope to
warn the world of the dangear of this regime
regardless of how many centrifuges spin in Iran,"
the letter states. The group blasted "Western
apologists and appeasers of Iranian theocracy" who
have been trying to jin up support for the deal, saying they "do no favors to the
Iranian people." Warning that the deal will fill
the regime's coffers with up to $150 billion in
frozen assets, they warned: "When the Iranian
regime no longer fears its epople, then the
world will no longer have a reason to fear the
Iranian regime." Among the signatories were
noted former political prisoners Ahmad Batebi,
Roozbeh Farahanipour, and Afshin Afshin-Jam,
writers, journalists, and supporters of jailed
dissident Ayatollah Kazemi-Boroujerdi. Read the
full
text of the letter.

Aug. 13, 2015: FDI President calls out
Rep. Chris Van Hollen for supporting Iran
deal. In an
oped appearing in the Washington
Examiner, Kenneth Timmerman noted that Van
Hollen's leap to support the deal showed once
again that the Maryland Democrat puts party before
country.
Aug. 3, 2015: Iran fabricates Wikileaks
cable in effort to smear UN Human Rights
rapporteur; regime surrogate in the U.S.
flogs nuclear deal. On
the front pages of regime controlled websites,
MOIS is pushing its latest
disinformation campaign to discredit Dr.
Ahmed Shaheed, the extraordinarily effective UN
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, by
forging fake Wikileaks cables claiming Dr. Shaheed
was operating as a paid stooge for the Saudi
government and had never-ever found a single
political prisoner in Iran's many secret prisons
and declared jails!

On the nuclear front, the regime has already filed
its first formal complaint alleging that
the United States is in material breech of the
JCPOA, most likely in an effort to lay the
groundwork for future, more serious claims that
will allow Iran to exploit the "escape clause"
built into the nuclear deal, at a moment most
advantageous to its political and military
ambitions.

Iranian intelligence agencies are working over to
push/sabotage the nuclear deal with the United
States and its partners, and to ensure there is no
domestic fallout from advocates of releasing
political prisoners and the jailed leaders of the
2009 Green Movement protests. In an excellent
insider's account of MOIS strategy and tactics,
Iran analyst Fariba Davoodi Mohajer dissects the
modus operandus of MOIS, its successful efforts to
infiltrate and direct opposition organizations,
its use of psychological warfare.

For anyone who thought the Iranian regime has no
supporters to conduct its propaganda and
misinformation campaigns in the United States,
check out the Sunday New York Times, which
includes a full page ad in savor of the nuclear
deal sponsored
by NIAC, which has been flogging sanctions
relief for years.

FDI calls on
its supporters to call their Senators and
Representatives to oppose the
nuclear deal and to
make a special call to Sen.
Chuck Schumer (D, NY), who is said
to be sitting on the fence. Schumer's Washington,
DC main office line: (202) 224-6542. For
additional office locations in New York,
click here.

July 31, 2015: California State Senator
Joel Anderson: sanctions remain in place. In separate
letters sent today to the heads of the California
Public Employees Pension Fund and the state
teachers pension fund, California state
Senator Joel Anderson noted there was "nothing in
the JCPOA which would necessite any changes in
state policy" regarding the divestment legislation
he authored and which is now state law. Following
on the heels of a similar finding by the City of
Los Angeles attorney (July 23, below), these moves
highlight the illegality of the JCPOA as
it infringes on state and local laws and
regulations.
July 24, 2015:Kerry hints the U.S. would defend
Iran against Israeli cyber-attack.
In a disturbing reply to questions from Senator
Marco Rubio (R, Fla) at the July 23 Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear
deal, Secretary of State John Kerry hinted that
the U.S. might counter its ally Israel if Israel
attempted a cyber-attack or sabotage against
Iran's nuclear facilities or infrastructure.

The question came in relation to Annex III of the
agreement, which pledges the P5+1 (including the
U.S.) to "strengthen Iran’s ability to protect
against, and respond to nuclear security threats,
including sabotage." Kerry initially tried to blow
away concerns expressed by Sen. Rubio that this
could mean it would deter an Israeli cyberattack,
then contradicted himself, saying "we just have to
wait until we get until that point" to decide what
to do. H/t
Jerry Gordon at the New English Review.

July 23, 2015: Los Angeles says
sanctions will remain in place.
In a slap in the face to Secretary of State Kerry
and the White House, the City Attorney for Los
Angeles confirmed in a letter this week that
sanctions legislation he co-authored in the State
Legislature in 2010 would remain in place until
repealed by the U.S. Congress or the state
legislature. The legislation bans the state,
cities, and counties from contracting with
businesses invested in Iran's energy sector, thus
forcing those businesses to chose between
investing in Iran or doing business in California,
a powerful tool that has been adopted in numerous
states and jurisdictions around the country.

The
letter from Michael N. Feuer came in
response to questions from citizens and activists,
including Roozbeh Farahanipour, who was elected
president of the West Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce this March. Farahanipour pointed out that
the nuclear deal (JCPOA) will remove sanctions
against Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC),
which has been responsible for some of the most
egregious terrorist attacks by the Iranian regime. "What will be the
world’s response to the IRGC’s first
international terrorist action after sanction
relief?”
Farahanipour
told a local reporter.

July 20, 2015: Stop Nuclear Iran
rally in New York.

FDI has
joined a broad coalition of U.S.
organizations that has called for a massive rally
this Wednesday, July 22, at 5:30 PM
at Times Square in New York. The disastrous
Vienna agreement enables the Islamic regime in
Tehran to expand its reign of terror both at
home and abroad, better armed, better funded,
and with fewer constraints than before.

Additional rallies against a nuclear Iran will
be held in
Toronto (in front of the U.S. consulate,
1:30 pm on July 22), in Phoenix,
AZ at 6:30 pm, and at the Westwood Federal building in
Los
Angeles on Sunday, July 26, from 2-4 pm.

Bring your voices, your noisemakers, your
friends and family....

July 15, 2015:Iran
deal enhances regime, disregards people.

Statement from
FDI President & CEO Kenneth R.
Timmerman:

The nuclear agreement announced on July 14
is a bad deal for the Iranian people, and
for the people of the region. Unverifiable
at its core, it virtually guarantees a
nuclear arms race with Pakistan helping
Sunni allies Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and
possibly Turkey and Egypt, to counter the
growing power of the Islamic Republic of
Iran. It enables the regime to continue
enriching itself and its elites through
hundreds of front companies and black market
oil traders, selling the people’s resources
without accountability. As President Hassan
Rouhani said in his speech yesterday, "our
prayers have been answered." He hastened to
add, so have the prayers of Hamas and
Hezbollah, who will see their annual
paychecks from Tehran increase.

Worse, under this agreement, apparently
drafted in Tehran, the United States agrees
to lift sanctions on a host of murderers,
including notorious former Qods Force
commander Qassem Suleymani, IRGC commander
Rahim Yahya Safavi, IRGC intel chief Morteza
Rezai, al Qaeda-enabler Gen. Moh. Baqr
Zolqadr, as well as missile and nuclear
procurement agencies and the IRGC itself.

This agreement makes a mockery of American
democracy, by putting the onus on Congress
if it "interferes" with the dictates of an
executive branch it repeatedly warned and
passed legislation to limit. It remains
baffling what prompted the U.S.
administration to throw away a winning hand,
built up judiciously since 2005 with
international support, in exchange for total
capitulation to a nuclear-capable,
expansionist Sharia regime in Iran.

Elections
matter.
Often they also matter for people who live far away
from those who vote.

A Canadian human rights group blasted the leader of
Canada's Liberal Party, the Hon. Justin Trudeau, for
telling Canadian television that if his party comes to
power in the next elections, they planned to end
Canada's bombing mission in Iraq and would restore
diplomatic relations with Iran. “It is very
disappointing and disturbing that Justin Trudeau is
speaking in the interest of murderers, criminals and
human rights violatorsrather than innocent civilians
and freedom fighters,” said Ardeshir Zarezadeh,
director of the International Center for Human Rights
in Canada and former Iranian political prisoner.
“Extremists appreciate such positions of politicians.”
June 5, 2015: Iran continues to develop
missiles, nukes. A
long-delayed Pentagon report on Iran's
military capabilities was finally delivered to
Congress this week. It concluded that Iran
"continues to develop technological
capabilities that also could be applicable to
nuclear weapons, including ballistic missile
development," a
one-page summary states. The report,
apparently withheld so not to disrupt the P5+1
nuclear negotiations, also
found that Iran was expanding its
capability of denying access to the Strait of
Hormuz by "quietly fielding increasingly
lethal symmetric and asymmetric weapons
systems, including more advanced naval mines,
small but capable submarines, coastal defense
cruise missile batteries, attack craft, and
anti-ship ballistic missiles. The report came
as Iran also expanded
its direct military intervention in
both Iraq and Syria.

May 31, 2015: Nazanin
Afshin-jan outs Canadian Muslim groups for
honoring Khomeini.
Canadian human rights activist Nazanin
Afshin-jan
called on Canadians to protest a "celebration" of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic
Republic, scheduled for this afternoon in Toronto.
"There should be a day of mourning rather than a
celebration on his anniversary," she said. "If you
were aware that a group of people were celebrating the
acts committed by ISIS would you come out in protest?
Please come out to demonstrate against this tyrant
that has caused so much pain anguish and unrest for so
many people." Read the full text of her comments here.

The "celebration" of Khomeini, one week before the
anniversary of his death in 1989, was sponsored by the
Muslim Community of the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] and
is being held at the Islamic Society of York Region.May 29, 2015: IAEA finds that Iran
expands nuclear material production, despite
JPOA.In
its latest report, the
IAEA found that Iran has slightly
increased the production of uranium
hexafluoride gas, and now has a stockpile of
8,714.7 kg of U-235 enriched up to 5%, enough
to make several warheads with additional
enrichment.
May 13, 2015: Protests spread in Iranian
Kurdistan. Protests in and
around Mahabad, the regional capital of
Iranian Kurdistan, began
on May 7 after a local Kurdish woman
either jumped or was pushed from a upper
window of the four-star Tara hotel, apparently
to escape being raped by an MOIS agent. Over
the past week, the protests have spread, and
the regime has arrested more than 400 people
in a heavy security crackdown. Now local
Kurdish groups are calling
for a general strike throughout the
Kurdish region.

• America's forgotten
hostages. As the Obama administration
continues to negotiate a nuclear deal with
Iran, they forget the plight of American
hostages in Iran. And it's not only the
best-known among them that they forget, but a
whole category of U.S. green card holders,
U.S. persons, who have been tortured,
murdered, or driven to commit suicide, such as
journalist Siamak Pourzand. Read FDI President
Kenneth R. Timmerman's column
in Frontpage mag.

April 4, 2015:"Historic" nuclear deal looks
different from Washington and Tehran. After
a last minute play by Iranian negotiators to
buy more time, the P5+1 and Iran reached a
"historic" agreement in Iran that will lift
international sanctions on Iran in exchange
for some limits on the nuclear program. But
just how solid are the achievements that the
U.S. and its partners are claiming? According
to Amir Taheri, in its
Persian description of the deal, the
Iranian regime is claiming that it has accept
few if any limits on its program, while the
U.S. State Department issued a lengthy
statement, spelling out detail after detail of
the commitments it claimed Iran had made.

Meanwhile, a former top aide to Islamic
Republic president Hassan Rouhani, who
defected to Switzerland during the talks,
revealed that the U.S. negotiating team was
carrying Tehran's water, rather than fighting
to defend and promote American interests. "The
US negotiating team are mainly [in Lausanne] to
speak on Iranís behalf with other members of the 5+1
countries and convince them of a deal," Amir Hossein
Motaghi told an opposition TV network in London.
Essentially, as FDI president Kenneth R. Timmerman wrote
in Frontpage magazine,"what
Motaghi said is that Secretary Kerry is working as
an agent of Iran and has been arm-twisting reluctant
allies, such as the French, into accepting what they
know is a bad deal.

"
March 16, 2015: Hassan Rouhani,
executioner-in-chief. Every
day, another hanging - or rather, at least two,
according to a new report released by Iran Human
Rights and Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort (Together
Against the Death Penalty). In the 18 months since
Rouhani took over as president, the Islamic Republic
authorities have executed at
least 1193 people, or two per day - higher than
at any time in the past eighteen years. As FDI found
when we started to monitor executions in Iran 20 years
ago, only a portion of the executions are carried out
publicly; today, less than 10%. Most of the "secret"
executions were carried out inside prisons. Those
executed included juvenile offenders, women, former
Muslim believers, and large numbers of Kurds and other
ethnic minorities. Download
the full report here.

Meanwhile, a Kurdish human rights group released its
report on the indiscriminate murder of porters
at Iran's borders, hunted down by Iranian border
guards and IRGC units and not reported in any
statistics. When the Iranian regime reports at all on
such incidents, they refer to them as "skirmishes"
with "smugglers."

In Tehran, as activist Banafsheh Zand reports,
an Iranian Foreign Ministry official warned that
Iranians living abroad "would face serious problems
should they enter into Iran."
March 15, 2015:Prominent Iranian
Dissident Blasts Obama From Jail
Heshmat Tabarzadi, a prominent Iranian prisoner
of conscience jailed for leading protests
against the regime, has smuggled a letter for
President Obama to human rights activist Manda
Ervin of the Alliance of Iranian Women, who made
it available to FDI.

In the letter, he revealed that he is being held
in a cell with American pastor Saeed Abedini in
Rajai-Shahr prison outside Karaj, in the Tehran
suburbs.

Chastising the American president about his
failure to intercede on Abedini's behalf,
Tabarzadi writes: "I heard that you met with his
wife and children, and that his son, little
Jacob, asked you to help release his father for
his birthday. But we have not heard you demand
the release of the hostage Abedini from the
tyrant Khamenei."

The Iranian regime accused Tabarzadi of being
one of the ring-leaders behind the student
uprising of July 1999, and initially sentenced
him to nine years in prison. Tabarzadi was
released before the end of his sentence, after
spending two years in solitary confinement in
Evin Prison in Tehran, on condition he refrain
from public statements. He broke his silence
after the mass demonstrations against the regime
in 2009, and was arrested again on December 27,
2009 and sentenced to another eight years in
jail.

The letter, which Mrs. Ervin translated and sent
by registered mail to the White House, called on
President Obama to maintain sanctions on Iran
and to help the pro-freedom movement. "A large
majority of the Iranian people are opposed to
the Islamic regime," said Ervin, who has
testified before Congressional committees on
human rights issues and the oppression of women
in Iran.

So far, the White House has not responded to the
letter.

"You claim that the only choice that you have is
either to make a deal with Khamenei -- which I
believe means surrender -- or war… Mr.
President; we Iranian people submit to you and
the people of the world that there is another
way. Please
sanction and weaken the illegal regime of
Khamenei, and empower the people to overthrow
this tyranny," Tabarzadi wrote.

FDI President Kenneth R. Timmerman said the
letter shows that the pro-freedom movement in
Iran is "alive and well, and is not fooled by
the sham nuclear negotiations underway with the
West."

Permalink
with
additional resources.
March 14, 2015: White House replies to Sen.
Corker. After Javad Sharif
revealed that Iran expects the U.S. to press the
UN Security Council to revoke sanctions, Sen.
Corker sent a letter to the White House asking
for clarification (see below). White House Chief
of Staff Denis McDonough sent
a detailed reply, confirming the need for
UN action, and further revealing that the White
House intended to lift sanctions on Iran by
using "waivers" built into existing U.S.
legislation, rather than asking Congress to act.
McDonough sent the letter on Saturday night -
guaranteeing that the story wouldn't hit the
Sunday talk shows and would be "old news" by
Monday. (Full text of the letter here).

Full text
of Sen. Corker's Iran Nuclear Agreement
Review Act of 2015 (S.615).
March 13, 2015: Nuclear deal appears closer. Despite
all the hubbub about the
letter signed by 47 Republican
Senators, schooling Iran's leaders on the
U.S. constitution and the separation of powers,
the U.S. and Iran danced closer to a nuclear
deal this week.

In Tehran, Foreign Minister Javad Sharif
expressed victory in the talks, saying Tehran
had come out "the
winner."

At the United Nations in New York, the United
States and other Security Council members states
began
discussing a resolution that would lift
all UN sanctions on Iran.

While Secretary of State Kerry still refuses to
reveal details of a prospective deal to
Congress, FDI
President Kenneth R. Timmerman points
out
in a column
this morning that his Iranian counterpart, Javad
Sharif, happily disclosed secrets in Tehran --
in English, to boot.

Iran's goals in the negotiations remain clear:
1) relief from U.S. and international sanctions
on oil exports and financial transactions, 2)
maintaining its nuclear infrastructure, and 3)
acceptance by the international community of its
"right" to enrich uranium, despite five UN
Security Council resolutions acknowledging that
Iran has violated its commitments under the
Nonproliferation Treaty, acts which
automatically exclude Iran from any of the
rights of non-nuclear states under the Treaty.
As Timmerman concluded in his column, whether
such a deal will prevent or even delay a nuclear
holocaust in the Middle East "is anyone's
guess."

March 3, 2015: After historic speech by PM
Netanyahu to Congress, US Senate to demand
oversight of Iran negotiations. Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) said
after today's speech by Netanyahu to a Joint
Meeting of Congress that the Senate would take
up the bi-partisan Iran Nuclear Agreement Review
Act (S-615) next week. The bill to review the
P5+1 negotiations with Iran was introduced
jointly by Republican Senator Bob Corker,
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, and his Democrat counterpart (and
predecessor as SFRC chair), Sen. Robert Menendez
of New Jersey. President Obama has
said he would veto the bill. View FDI
President's tweets on the Netanyahu speech
@kentimmerman

• Even the Washington Post thinks the Obama
administration "needs to provide real answers to
Netanyahu's arguments." In a lead editorial, the
Post
blasts the administration for essentially
just trying to shout Netabyahu down, rather than
seriously confront his case against a nuclear
deal that in his words would "pave the way" to
an Iranian bomb.
Jan. 22, 2015: State Department #2 says U.S. has
no intention of stopping Iran nuclear program. The
former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Sen. Robert Menendez (D, NJ), blasted
Deputy
Secretary of State Tony Blinken yesterday
over the administration's positions on Iran's
nuclear program. In a blistering exchange,
Mendenez accused Blinken and the administration
for failing to take any steps to eliminate
Iran's nuclear program and using "talking points
that come straight out of Tehran."

“[I]sn’t it true that even the deal that you are
striving towards is not to eliminate any Iranian
[nuclear] breakout capability, but to constrain
the time in which you’ll get the notice of such
breakout capability?” Menendez asked Blinken.
“Is that a fair statement, yes or no?”

“Yes, it is,” Blinken responded.

Blinken was confirmed in party line vote on Dec.
16, 2014, after Senator John McCain had vowed to
block his nomination over statements Blinken had
made praising Iraq as stable and secure as the
U.S. prepared to end its military presence.

Meanwhile, more details emerge of the U.S.
concessions to Iran, including unilateral
lifting
of economic sanctions, without any Iranian
counter-part. This comes after President Obama
vowed to veto new Iran sanctions legislation,
and called on British Prime Minister David
Cameron to directly lobby U.S. Senators last
week to vote block a sanctions vote.
Jan. 21, 2015: More on Nisman death: Claudia
Rossett reports in Forbes that Nisman had been
warning for years that Iran's terrorist
penetration of Latin America wasn't limited to
Argentina, and that his superiorsbanned
him in 2013 from testifying befor the
U.S. Congress on Iranian terror networks in the
Western hemisphere. (h/t Banafsheh Zand)

- FDI Director Kenneth Timmerman's recollection
of
Nisman in FrontPage magazine.
Jan. 20, 2015: Jan. 20, 2015: FDI, Public Enemy
#1. It’s not the first time,
but today's article in the IRGC-controlled Mashregh
News
website, FDI once again makes the hit
parade of IRGC enemies in the West.

The article repeats
oft-cited claims that FDI is spearheading a U.S.
government effort to overthrow the Islamic
regime in Iran, and was reproduced verbatim in
more than a dozen regime-controlled websites,
most of them controlled by the IRGC or MOIS.

But in a break with previous such attacks, this
one contained a special twist, blasting FDI for
opposing (and exposing) the National Iranian
American Council (NIAC), and its founder,
Swedish-Iranian national, Trita Parsi. The
author praised NIAC and Parsi for opposing
regime change in Iran, supporting negotiations
between the U.S. and Iran, and more generally
for defending the Islamic Republic in the United
States.

The author claimed that a recent poll showed
that 96% of Iranian-Americans saw Parsi as a
"lobbyist" for the Islamic Republic.

The timing of this
latest broadside against FDI is worth noting. On
Sunday morning, helicopters Israeli
reportedly
killed a Hezbollah operational team in Syria
that included Jihad Mugniyeh, son of the former
Hezbollah military commander.

The elder Mugniyeh was identified by Argentinean
prosecutor Alberto Nisman as the logistics
coordinator of the 1992 attack on the Israeli
embassy in Buenos Aires, and the July 1994 truck
bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center that killed 86
people.

Half a world away, Nisman himself was found dead
in his apartment that same night, an
alleged
suicide.

FDI CEO and president Kenneth R. Timmerman had
been an expert witness in the AMIA case and was
cited by Nisman in his 2006 indictment
more than a dozen times. Timmerman was also
instrumental in laying out the elder Mugniyeh's
involvement in recruiting the al Qaeda
terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks on
America.

A
side note on the
picture of Timmerman that appears in the
Mashregh News broadside: it was grabbed from a
video taken at a campaign event at the B'nai
Israel synagogue in Maryland in October 2012—but
from a portion of the video that the campaign
never posted online!

Jan. 17, 2015: Standing up for press freedom...
in Iran. Blogger Banafsheh Zand reminds
us that journalists in Iran continue to
face persecution, arrest, and torture from the
regime. Where is the outrage from the West?
Jan. 16, 2015: Kerry-Zarif meet in Paris. After
talks in Geneva on Wednesday, Secretary of State
John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart take
their traveling circus to Paris for the second
time this week on Friday, as the pro-Tehran
lobby once again peddled the fanciful notion
that the regime is divided
over
making concessions to the West - so
therefore Washington should be making all the
concessions!
Jan. 15, 2015: White House calls nuclear deal
separate from hostage negotiations. White
House spokesman Josh Earnest told
reporters that the U.S. could conclude a
nuclear agreement with Islamic Republic, even as
the regime continues to hold American citizens
hostage.
Jan. 14, 2015: U.S. negotiating goals shrink. Former
Asst
Secretary of State Robert Einhorn argues in
an
insider's account of the nuclear
negotiations that the U.S. goal has shrunk so
very small that the best we can hope for is an
agreement that delays the time Iran would need
to produce weapons-grade uranium from 4-6 weeks
to 10-12 months.

January 6, 2015: FDI Director in Frontpage mag:
What do Iranian defectors, the
Iranian opposition, and the underground house
church all have in common? The CIA has
mishandled or misunderstood them all. Read Ken
Timmerman's column, Carrying
His
Cross to Elam.

Jan. 3, 2015: Iranian American pastor begins 3rd
year of prison sentence. Pastor
Saeed Abedini, arrested during a visit to Iran
in September 2012 was sentenced in January 2013
to eight years in jail because of his faith.
American supporters have called on believers to
join
in a vigil of prayer and fasting to call
for his release.

Nov. 22, 2014: A bad nuclear deal in the offing.
Secretary of State Kerry and others
continue to say that no deal is better than a
bad deal with Iran, but do they really mean it?

Last Wednesday, 43 of the 45 Republicans in the
U.S. Senate wrote to President Obama, demanding
that the President bring any agreement before
the Senate for approval.

And at a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee
hearing on Thursday, Nov. 20, Democrat
Ted
Deutch of Florida led the charge, saying
that any deal “must cut off all of Iran’s
pathways to a nuclear weapon,” including the
dismantling of its centrifuge program and the
Arak heavy water reactor, and full transparency
on Iran’s Past Military activities.
Iranian regime negotiators, parliamentarians and
other commentators have explicitly rejected all
of these restrictions, claiming that the only
issue on the table is lifting U.S. and
international economic sanctions.

It is our view that the regime’s nuclear program
will spark a regional nuclear arms race and
endangers the security of ordinary Iranians and
should be entirely dismantled.

Nov. 19, 2014: Mobile
billboard campaign in Washington, DC.

A coalition of Iranian human rights
groups and Justice Through Music launched a
mobile billboard campaign in the U.S. capitol on
Wednesday, to bring attention to stepped up
repression of women inside Iran. The execution
last month of Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year old
woman accused of stabbing to death a former
intelligence ministry official who was raping
her, has
generated
worldwide indignation, as have a spate of
acid-throwing attacks against unveiled women in
Iranian streets.

Nov. 13, 2014: Voice of America TV now promoted
by Iranian state media! Members
of Congress might think that taxpayer funding
for the
Voice of America's Persian language service is
aimed at providing Iranians an alternative to
the propaganda they receive daily from the state
run media. But some VOA shows have become
favorites of the Iranian regime itself.

Such is the case of "Ofogh" (Horizon), a news
show hosted by Siamak
Dehghanpour. In this photo, taken at
the booth of the official Fars News booth at
this week's Media fair in Tehran, Dehghanpour
can be seen on the set of "Ofogh" with the VOA
logo in both Farsi and English behind him.
Dehghanpour apparently was so proud of being
accepted by the state-run media in Iran that he
posted the photo on Ofogh's
Facebook
page.

In the comments section below, a viewer using
the screen name Al Noori called him, "Voice of
Ayatollah in VOA." Sara Safiri commented that it
was "no surprise" to see Dehghanpour featured at
the Tehran media fair since he already boasted
of taking part in a closed door dinner in New
York this September during the United Nations
General Assembly hosted by Iranian Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif that gathered regime
supporters in the United States.

Nov. 7, 2014: Iranian activist honored
as "hero" by California Senate. California
State Senator Joel
Anderson (R, El Cajon) took the unprecedented
step of honoring Iranian activist Roozbeh
Farahanipour as a "California Hero" in a
ceremony in his district office today.
California Senate Concurrent Resolution 97,
authored by Sen. Anderson, officially declares
September as "California Heroes Month," and
Farahanipour was one of the first nominees. "You
have set yourself apart by showing concern for
others in need, and take action to help others
without expectation of reward," Sen. Anderson
said. Farahanipour, a leader of the 1999 student
uprising in Tehran who came to the United States
in 2002 after he was released from an Iranian
prison, has become a local watchdog in Los
Angeles in exposing Islamic
Republic agents.
(For a larger photo of the certificate, click
here).

Oct. 10, 2014: New satellite photos confirm
Parchin explosion. An analysis of
before and after satellite photographs by the
Institute for Science and International Security
concludes that two buildings were destroyed and
four others damaged in the events that
reportedly occurred on October 5. The
photographs
also showed trucks present at the site of
the damage that appeared to be either fire
trucks or debris haulers. Some sources are
claiming that a “foreign power” sabotaged the
site, and that Iran may have ordered Hezbollah
to make a reprisal attack against Israeli
positions in the disputed Shebaa farms area near
the Golan.
Hat-tip to Jerry Gordon at The
Iconoclast.

Oct. 8, 2014: Pro-regime activists try to sway
Westwood Council. In a display of
force that shocked the Americans present,
Hezbollah-style thugs invaded the hearing
chambers of the Westwood Neighborhood Council
tonight, in an effort to get the Council to
rescind its resolutions banning Islamic regime
signs in Westwood. Local attorney Guita
Tahmesseb had emailed and phoned Council
chairman Jerry Brown and other members, claiming
that the resolutions were “discriminatory
against the Iranian community,” despite the fact
that the resolutions were introduced by the
Council’s only Iranian-American member. Despite
pressure in the room from bearded pro-regime
activists, Council members reaffirmed the
resolutions when it came time to vote.

Oct. 6, 2014: Explosion at Parchin. A
powerful explosion rocked Iran's oldest military
production plant at Parchin on Sunday night,
killing at least two workers, Reuters
reported, citing Iranian government media
sources. The ensuing fire could be seen nine
miles away.

Parchin is a sprawling military facility that
includes the oldest gunpowder plant in the
Middle East and today is suspected by the IAEA
of having
been used for secret nuclear weapons tests.
Built initially by Nazi Germany, it was expanded
and modernized in the 1970s by SNPE of France to
make a wide variety of explosives and solid
missile propellants. Israel's minister of
intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, recently
reiterated longstanding claims by the IAEA
that Iran had tested internal neutron initiators
at Parchin in 2000-2001. These
polonium-beryllium devices have no other purpose
than to trigger a nuclear weapon.

The
Washington,DC-based
Institute for Science and International
Security, ISIS, has been tracking construction
and concealment activities at Parchin for many
years using
commercial
satellite imagery.

Oct. 5, 2014:
Three Christian converts arrested in
Iran. Security officers raided
the home of a Christian actor in Esfahan on
Sept. 27, arresting him and two other recent
converts to Christianity. Shahran Gaedi, 27, was
arrested and released already earlier this year,
reportedly
because of his involvement in the “Iranian Jesus
Film Project.”

Oct. 1,
2014: Former Deputy CIA Director turns blind eye
to Iranian involvement in Benghazi attacks. In
a recent speech in Florida, former deputy CIA
director Mike Morell denied that Iranian
government operatives or Hezbollah operatives
were on the ground in Benghazi during the Sept.
11, 2012 attacks that cost the lives of four
Americans. FDI director Kenneth R. Timmerman's
latest book, Dark
Forces:
the Truth About What Happened in Benghazi,
details Iran's on-the-ground involvement in the
uprising against Qaddafi and in the attacks.On
his
website, Timmerman offers additional information
on the Iranian involvement, including photographs
of the Iranian Red Crescent team allegedly
"kidnapped" in Benghazi on July 31, 2012 as part
of an elaborate intelligence ruse by the Quds
Force aimed at tricking the CIA into thinking
the threat to the U.S. compounds in Benghazi
were over. According to Timmerman's account,
the Iranian regime was seeking to drive the
Americans out of Libya and thrust that nation
into chaos, two goals that have been met.

Timmerman reports on Morell's recent speech, his
Iran denial, and Senator Lindsay Graham's own
accusations against Morell in the October
edition of the New
English
Review.

Since leaving government, Morell has gone to
work for Beacon Global Strategies, a recently
established consulting firm jointly owned by
several Hillary Clinton confidants, including
her "enforcer," Philippe Reines.

Timmerman
was
interviewed on the book, Morell, and the
U.S.-sanctioned arms smuggling operation being
run out of Benghazi on the John Bates "Middle
East Round Up" on Sept. 16, which the New
English Review has
transcribed.

Former DIA analyst Dr. Lawrence Franklin writes
on the efforts of "Iranian-American patriot"
Roozbeh Farahanipour to drive
the
IRI out of Westwood.

And from Roozbeh, FDI has learned that at least
one Westwood business, worried by the
possibility of law enforcement action against
him for sanctions violations, has changed
his Farsi-language sign so it no longer
offers his services on behalf of the
non-existent Iranian "embassy" in Washington,
DC.

Sept. 29, 2014: "New Iran" opposition group
reveals that IRI killed nuclear scientist. The
sister of Iranian nuclear scientist Dr.
Ardeshire Hosseinpour, who was murdered in 2007,
now claims he was murdered by the regime for
refusing to cooperate with the nuclear weapons
program. In video
conference
calls with the California-based opposition
group, The New Iran, Mahboobeh Hosseinpour
said her brother was contacted by three special
agents of the regime's Defense ministry "with a
direct message" from Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, who was seeking Dr. Hosseinpour's
help. When Dr. Hosseinpour turned down repeated
offers, including a senior rank in the IRGC and
part ownership of several factories as perks,
regime thugs assassinated him, Mahboobeh told the
Media Line, in a call arranged by Dr. Iman
Foroutan of New Iran.

Sept. 26, 2014: "Moderate" Rouhani says jailing
American pastor for his faith shows Iran's
"fairness and justice." Regime
president Hassan Rouhani once
again showed his spots in an interview with
CNN's Christian Amanpour on the 2nd anniversary
of the jailing of visiting American pastor,
Saeed Abedini. In a rambling response to her
question on prisoners of faith and political
prisoners, Rouhani said they had all received a
fair trial and received adequate legal
representation. But as Jordan Sekulow points
out, Pastor Saeed "wasn’t made aware of the
charges brought against him until a week before
trial. He was not allowed to meet with his
attorney until 24 hours before trial. He
and his attorney were barred from attending the
second day of his trial as evidence was brought
against him with no opportunity to defend
himself. That's not Justice. That's
not fairness," Sekulow
wrote.
Sept. 25, 2014: Westwood Neighborhood Council
vs. the Islamic Republic of Iran. In
an interview with FrontPage magazine, Roozbeh
Farahanipour explains the significance of the
recent motions passed by the Westwood
Neighborhood Council to limit the IRI presence
in Los Angeles. "Westwood was once the
safe-haven of Iranian refugees fleeing the
Islamic Republic…Sadly, however, drizzled
in-between those seeking safety and a better
life, are businesspeople and other individuals
closely-tied to the ruling regime back in
Tehran, sent here with an agenda, a goal and a
mission." Breaking their strangle hold on the
community was his goal in passing resolutions to
enforce U.S. sanctions in Westwood, Farahanipour
said.

Sept. 11, 2014: Westwood
Neighborhood Council passes resolutions banning
IRI business in Los Angeles. In a
historic move, the Westwood Neighborhood
Council, an elected body in a heavily
Iranian-American neighborhood of Los Angeles,
voted 17-1 last night to approve two resolutions
banning local businesses from deceptive
activities in violation of U.S. sanctions on
Iran.The
resolutions
were the result
of an investigation by Council member Roozbeh
Farahanipour, a pro-freedom activist involved in
organizing the 1999 student protests in Iran,
who found that local businesses were advertising
visa, passport, and notarial services on behalf
of the Iranian regime. (Click images).

Farahanipour presented photographs of storefront
signs advertising Iran Air, which is banned from
doing business in the United States because of
its ties to terrorism. He also showed
photographs of signs that appeared innocuous in
English, but which in Farsi advertised services
in violation of U.S. sanctions.

"This is a great victory
for the pro-freedom movement," Farahanipour told
FDI. "Westwood is the heart of the Iranian
community in the United States, and in recent
years the opposition has not been very active.
This shows that the opposition is still alive
and well in Westwood."

In the first resolution, aimed at enforcing U.S.
sanctions on Iran, noted that Iranian "service"
bureaux in Westwood used same word "Khatamaat"
as al Qaeda used in the 1980s and 1990s when it
was recruiting jihadis to its cause in
Afghanistan. It also called on Los Angeles City
Councilman Paul Koretz to review Farahanipour’s
evidence and to presaent a plan within 30 days
"to safeguard the neighborhood against possible
terrorist infiltration and illegal economic
activities." (Read
the full motion here).

The second resolution gave Westwood neighborhood
businesses three weeks notice to remove "illegal
signs, street banners, symbols and
advertisements" promoting relations or business
with the Islamic Republic of Iran "and its related
institutions and companies."

Most significantly, the resolution also banned
the display of the flag of the Islamic Republic,
as well as advertisements for Iran Air, and
accused some local businesses of "benefiting
financially by conducting illegal business with
the IRI, facilitating its presence in Westwood
and establishing an atmosphere of fear among
Iranian Americans in our area." (Read
the full motion here).

California State Senator Joel Anderson (R-San
Diego) flew in from Sacramento to speak in
support of the resolutions at Wednesday’s
hearing.

"Roozbeh is right to be outraged that in a post
9/11 America, any local business would advertise
themselves as agents of the Islamic Republic of
Iran, we all should be outraged, too," Anderson
said. "The Islamic Republic of Iran is a
well-recognized sponsor of terrorism around the
world."In his presentation
to the Council, Farahanipour cited recent
statements by David Cohen, Undersecretary of
Treasury for Terrorism and Financial
Intelligence, warning businesses that selective
sanctions relief under the Joint Program of
Action with the Iranian regime is not an
invitation by the U.S. government suggesting
that Iran is "open for business."

He also presented a broad selection of photos of
local shopfronts advertizing travel, shipping,
and other services with Iran. (Farahanipour’s
Powerpoint is available
here).

April 9, 2014: Extraordinary admissions from
former director of Iran's nuclear agency: we hid
information from IAEA. Fereydoon
Abbasi headed Iran's Atomic Energy Agency under
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In
an astonishing interview with the Iranian daily
Khorassan, he revealed that Iran hid design
information it was required to provide to the
IAEA on the Arak heavy water reactor because
Western intelligence agencies were using that
information to sabotage Iran's nuclear programs.

For example, he explained, if Iran reported that
a certain pump had not yet reached Iran, Western
intelligence agencies would "search the globe
for companies that make the pump, and pressure
them.They
would pressure that country or company not to
transfer the parts or equipment to Iran, or
would allow them to do so [only] after
sabotaging [the parts]... For instance, if it
was an electronic system, they would infect it
with a virus, or plant explosives in it, or even
alter the type of components, in order to
paralyze [Iran's] system.
Question: All these events [actually]
happened?
Abbasi: Everything I said happened..."
Read
the full interview at MEMRI.
March 31, 2014: Former hostage says U.S. should deny
visa to hostage-taker
'ambassador.' Barry Rosen, one of the
54 U.S. embassy personnel held hostage for 444
days in Tehran by Iranian "students" from
1979-1981, urged the State Department to deny a
visa to President Rouhani's pick to become the
Islamic Republic's top diplomat in the U.S.
Allowing Hamid
Aboutalebi to become the regime's
Permanent Representative to the United Nations
in New York would be "an outrage" and a
"disgrace," Rosen
told
FoxNews.

Update April 7: State
Department spokesperson Marie Harf, after
dodging questions on Aboutalebi, said the
State Department found his nomination
"extremely troubling" and had "raised
our
concerns" with Tehran.

March 15,
2014: UN human rights rapporteur says little
change under Rouhani. Ahmed
Shadeed releases his annual report, blasting
Rouhani for taking only "baby
steps" to improve the human rights in
Iran, while regime forces continue are actively
"working to suppress the rights of the people."
Predictably, the regime still won't allow
Shadeed or any of his staff visit Iran.

Shadeed admirably lists the names and alleged
"offenses" of hundreds of political prisoners in
Iranian jails, including Baha'is and Christians
persecuted for their faith, human rights
advocates, political activists, and Ethnic
minorities. Download
the full report.

March 14, 2014: Former U.S. intelligence officer
says Kerry may be compromised. A
former Iran analyst at the Defense Intelligence
Agency is asking tough questions about Secretary
of State John Kerry's relationship to his
Iranian counter-part, Javad Sharif, as rumors
fly that Sharif's son was the best man at the
wedding of Kerry's daughter to an Iranian
national. Larry Franklin also questions why
Kerry did not disclose his daughter's
recent marriage to an Iranian until after
he was confirmed by the Senate as Sec/State.Read
the
full story.

Jan. 14, 2014: Hassan Rouhani, nuclear cheat. Now
it’s official: for Iranian president Hassan
Rouhani, the nuclear deal struck with the West
in Geneva in November was just an excuse to get
sanctions relief, and Iran has no intention of
scaling back its nuclear ambitions. ”Our
relationship w/the world is based on Iranian
nation’s interests,” Rouhani tweeted on Jan. 14.
“In Geneva agreement world powers surrendered to
Iranian nation’s will.”

The Islamic Republic’s “moderate” clerical
president expanded on what he meant by the
West’s “surrender” in a speech in the oil-rich
province of Khuzestan today. “The Geneva
agreement means the wall of sanctions has
broken. The unfair sanctions were imposed on the
revered and peace-loving Iranian nation,' he
said (with
translation
by the Associated Press). 'It means an
admission by the world of Iran's peaceful
nuclear program.'"

The Iranian side has a very different view on
what they agreed to in Geneva than does
Secretary of State John Kerry. Iranian
negotiator Abbas Araqchi revealed that the two
sides would be bound by a 30-page “non-paper,”
which bore all the hallmarks of a secret side
agreement – something the State Department was
quick to deny.

Araqchi was crystal clear that Iran believes the
deal means the continuation of all Iranian
nuclear research programs and facilities. “No
facility will be closed; enrichment will
continue, and qualitative and nuclear research
will be expanded,” he told
the
Iranian Students News Agency on Monday.
“All research into a new generation of
centrifuges will continue."

Rouhani publicly gloated over
fooling the West in his last nuclear negotiation
when he ran for president last year. In
a
televised interview, he explained in
detail how he tricked the EU-3 negotiators in
talks from 2003 to 2005. Instead of shutting
down or even slowing its nuclear development,
Rouhani boasted that centrifuge production
actually increased, and Iran managed to finalize
its Uranium Conversion Facility in Isfahan, all
the while pretending it has "suspended" its
enrichment program. without the conversion plant
(often known as the "hex" plant, since that's
where Iran transforms uranium yellowcake into
Uranium hexafluoride for gaseous enrichment),
there could be no enrichment. Permalink.
Jan. 5, 2014: Heshmatollah Tabarzadi sent back to prison.
Former student leader and human
rights activist Heshmatollah Tabarzadi has been
ordered to return to prison, effective Jan. 6,
after a year-long "furlough." In a letter
explaining his reason for returning to jail,
Tabarzadi said his temporary release was
continent upon his silence, but that "the
situation of the people and my country is such
that I could no longer keep quiet." He blasted
so-called pro-freedom activists who have
embraced the new government of mullah Hassan
Rouhani. With his forced return to prison, "These
hypocrites can no longer claim to the international
community that after the emergence of President Hassan
Rouhani, Iran's human rights situation has improved,"
he wrote.
h/t Banafhsheh Zand.

Jan. 2, 2014: Assyrian church in Iran pressured
to close doors to Farsi-speaking Christians. The
Iranian regime, working through Quislings in the
Assyrian community, has forced St. Peter's
Church in Tehran to ban Farsi-speaking
Christians from attending worship services, Mohabat
News
reports. As happens regularly where
Christians are a tiny minority in Muslm lands,
the Iranian regime appears to have used its "pet
Christian," Assyrian Majles member Yonatan
Betkolia, to enforce this ban, aimed at
identifying and persecuting former Muslims who
have come to Jesus. Betkolia has family members
living in the United States, and is well known
within the Assyrian community as the Secretary
General of Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA).
"He will do whatever the Iranian regime orders
him to do," a prominent Assyrian activist told
FDI.

While this is a meretricious argument on its
face (the U.S. Congress decides questions of war
and peace, when it decides to assert its
Constitutional authority), it reveals the panic
that has gripped the pro-Tehran lobby over the
new sanctions legislation.

The Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013 is
significant because this is the first time
prominent Democrats have bucked a veto threat
from the Obama White House. It also is
significant because it closes a major
loophole in the petroleum sanctions that
has allowed countries such as China to continue
importing Iranian oil in the form of fuel oil,
while cracking down on the oil-mixing trade
sponsored by sanctions-busters such as Babak Zanjani,
who has been running cargoes of Iranian oil to
Labuan, Malaysia where he blends the Iranian oil
with oil from other countries and then sells it
as non-Iranian oil.

The new bill amends previous sanctions
legislation by replacing the ban on “crude oil
purchases from Iran” with an ban on “purchases
of petroleum from Iran or of Iranian origin,” a
new definition aimed to capture blended oil as
well as fuel oil, condensates, and other forms
of petroleum exported by Iran. It also expands
sanctions beyond the current energy, shipping
and shipbuilding to include certain ports and
free economic zones, as well as any economic
sector the President deems to be “strategic.”

The new bill also prevents the President from
cutting staff or appropriations to the Treasury
Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control,
the primary U.S. government agency involved in
sanctions enforcement, as happened during the
brief government shutdown last year. (Download
the latest draft here).
The authors of the bill clearly see the
measure as a means of “putting teeth” into the
ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the Iranian
regime over its nuclear program, not as a means
of impeding or prohibiting those negotiations.
But Iranian foreign Minister Javad Sharif warned
that if the bill passed, the negotiations were
over and Iran would back out of the Joint
Plan of Action.